I had a very nice moment of closure at Oracle OpenWorld a few weeks ago on a book collaboration with two senior Oracle technical managers—Tom Laszewski and Jason Williamson. Tom worked for me at Oracle in the mid-90s in Alliances Technical Services, and still runs a big portion of that group today (nice how that has endured for so long). In his spare time, Tom writes technical books. At Oracle OpenWorld, we did a press interview announcing the new book, which was a wonderful way to celebrate our collaboration.
About a year ago, Tom approached me about contributing a chapter to his new book idea—a definitive piece on Oracle-based application integration. Oddly, in this day and age of service-oriented architecture (SOA), and with all the many different integration products that Oracle has acquired in recent years, there is nothing that brings it all together. Tom set out to solve that, and we were happy to contribute to it.
We chose to write a chapter on the history of enterprise application integration with Oracle, given that we are uniquely qualified to do so. Back in the mid-90s, you see, we conceived and created the Cooperative Applications Initiative (CAI) at Oracle to better compete with SAP, our main applications competitor. SAP had a monolithic, “we build it all” strategy, and our only answer to that was to do a “best-of-breed” approach. That required out-of-the-box integration with all the application partners in the same boat as us, and CAI was the execution arm of that strategy.
This was in 1993-1995, before the integration middleware market even existed, so our application integration roots were all about business process integration, a uniquely valuable perspective.
In any case, I am very proud to recommend “Oracle Information Integration, Migration, and Consolidation” as the definitive source on enterprise application integration using the Oracle platform. You can buy it on Amazon.com quite easily. Don’t forget to read the “History of Application Integration” section of Chapter 8!
