Oracle SOA vs. IBM SOA White Paper

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model has become the cornerstone of business computing. Its ability to greatly accelerate the development of business-critical applications promotes business agility, decreases time-to-value and total cost of ownership (TCO), and greatly increases the efficiency and strategic value of IT. Beyond mere application development, it has become the favored approach for solving application and B2B integration issues, and provides a superior foundation for business process management. However, because SOA implementations tend to be complex, IT decision makers should carefully consider their choice of a SOA platform in terms of its ability to simplify the fundamental development, deployment, and management tasks involved. To aid in this process, Crimson Consulting undertook a research study for Oracle Corporation to provide a qualitative comparison, based on in-depth customer interviews, of the relative complexity—in terms of development, deployment, and management—of the industry's two leading SOA platforms: Oracle SOA Suite 11g and the corresponding IBM WebSphere, Tivoli, and other SOA-related products (not offered as a suite) needed to supply similar functionality. The results were consistent across all of the interviews: in general, Oracle SOA Suite is less complex than the equivalent IBM SOA solutions for the major tasks: ■ IBM's SOA portfolio comprises many more products than Oracle's SOA Suite, with frequent duplication or overlap of functionality. ■ The number of steps involved for fundamental operations tended to be higher for IBM, sometimes dramatically so. ■ The amount of time needed for a given operation tended to be higher for IBM—and often, the difference in time was much greater than that between the number of steps. ■ Interviewee judgments of operations complexity and the skill level required also favored Oracle SOA Suite. The primary reason for these advantages appears to be the greater integration and more unified environment of the Oracle SOA Suite, which was noted even by some of the IBM business partners interviewed; the Oracle suite's comprehensive Business Activity Monitoring/Business Intelligence capabilities also play a significant role. The projects that interviewees had been or were involved with varied too greatly to permit direct comparisons of time-to-value and IT productivity. Nonetheless, analysis of the interview results leads us to conclude that the lesser complexity of the Oracle SOA platform, which simplifies the development, deployment, and management of both applications and integration and business process management projects, offers reduced time to business value and improved IT efficiency compared to IBM's offerings. Finally, although …