Less coding, less outsourcing?

Less coding, less outsourcing?

Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 1:15 pm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/index.php?p=764

Will SOA take away a lot of outsourcers' business? Or will its impact be negligible?
Joe makes a good point here - technologies like SOA, and may I add BPM (Business Process Management), will have significant impact on the amount of coding going on in many large organizations. SOA's promise of reusable services and standard interfaces, combined with the revolutionary shift in way applications are developed using Business Process Management Suites will result in organizations becoming more and more adept at continuously modifying their information systems to keep in line with business requirements, without requiring down and dirty software coding.

However, in the short run it actually creates a lot of outsourcing potential as organizations rework legacy applications to bring them into the SOA framework. Also, there is a good chance that as SOA and BPM improve the agility of organizations in acting proactively or reacting to business needs, there will be considerably more work done in the future - and that would make up for any reduction in outsourcing. Outsourcing vendors are also keeping this in mind and upgrading their offerings from coding to business analysis, process consulting, etc.

Tags: BPM, BPMS, Business Process Management, Outsourcing, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services, Legacy, Offshore

ECM consolidation - afterthought to my earlier post

I think SAP might beat HP to the next announcement - by OpenText's silence it looks like SAP buys OpenText is the next big announcement! Any betting men out there want to define the odds?

technorati tags: ECM, consolidation, stellent, oracle, opentext, hp, sap

Another one bites the dust - ECM Consolidation Juggernaut continues

Oracle announced its bid for acquiring Stellent yesterday - most people were expecting Oracle to be the likely suitor for Filenet a couple of months ago. Stellent is a poor cousin to Filenet - but then Oracle has a need to fill the ECM gap in their product portfolio and Stellent may just do that.

What it doesn't bring to Oracle is the strong business process management / workflow platform that they would have got from Filenet. But I guess they could make an interesting play combining their BPEL Server (the one they acquired from Collaxa and is now renamed to be part of their Fusion middleware) with Stellent's ECM.

Stellent itself was mostly a web content management company till a few years back when they acquired Optika - a Filenet wannabe with strong Imaging and Workflow solutions. It will be interesting how this mix and match portfolio will be integrated into Oracle's offerings.

I guess now that Oracle has played its hand, the speculation moves on the next big acquisition - HP and Microsoft are the likely ones to make such an announcement. My bet is on HP acquiring either Opentext, Interwoven or Vignette within the next quarter.

technorati tags: ecm, consolidation, acquisition, document+management, imaging, workflow, bpm, bpel, oracle, stellent, hp, opentext, microsoft, vignette, interwoven