Oracle Gets Some Sun: Why Platforms Need More than Technology

There was a time when Sun Microsystems was a rising, shining force in Silicon Valley, parlaying its variation of the Unix operating system running on its proprietary hardware into quite a tidy empire of servers, workstations and software services for many major enterprises and Web publishers. Topping off Sun's holdings was the promising Java platform-independent applications environment, which enabled more than a decade's worth of software on many platform's beyond Sun's own. And recently Sun's acquisition of MySQL gave them a key component in Web-oriented database development. Great stuff, but not great enough to drive Sun into a more competitive position against giants such as Microsoft and IBM.

It makes perfect sense, then, for Oracle to have picked up Sun to offer them more leverage against those same giants. With cloud computing and other forces commoditizing network server hardware, the pressure is on for most technology companies to add more value further up the technology "stack" as cost-effectively as possible. Be it MySQL, Oracle's own database offerings or a cross-platform programming environment such as Java, it takes a very full kit of technology offerings these days to be able to devise solutions that command premium investments from most enterprises. Sun's traditional hardware and systems assets may be of some use to Oracle to protect its databases running on those platforms, but the far greater value to Oracle is to give it components that will enable it to attach its databases and value-add services to the applications development environments that allow for rapid, cost-effective services development.

In other words, having excellent software is a good thing, but these days it's more important to help your clients to have excellent solutions. Increasingly this means ensuring that you have every resource at your disposal that could contribute to those solutions. That includes, of course, access to all of the content sources that they need to deliver the right information at the right time in the right applications on the right platforms. It's simply no longer possible to capture all of those content sources in a single database or Web server. There are too many legacy platforms and databases and too many new and rapidly changing technologies collecting new sources of content to risk any technology company's future on a handful of content assets. Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems is a key acknowledgment that the future of computing technology makes effective content integration an absolute necessity.

No wonder, then, that MuseGlobal finds itself a certified Oracle partner. Our MuseConnect for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search uses our world-leading OEM content integration technologies to enable content from key databases, subscription information services and search engines to integrate with all of the sources already accessible via Oracle's own Secure Enterprise Search software. The MuseGlobal technologies behind MuseConnect for Oracle Secure Enterprise search have enabled hundreds of technology companies and publishers to connect their technology platforms to the content sources that they need at thousands of installations around the world. With over 6,000 Smart Connectors to a very wide variety of content types and sources, MuseGlobal enables any content-delivering platform to push its way up the technology "stack" to higher levels of value rapidly and very cost-effectively.

Certainly Oracle's acquisition of Sun bodes well for a marketplace that needs more powerful and cost-effective publishing solutions that can be delivered on a wider array of enterprise, home and mobile platforms than ever before. It's nice to know, though, that MuseGlobal's content connector solutions are a key component in just about every imaginable major information publishing platform available today. I expect that we'll be seeing a lot more healthy competition amongst the technology giants with this key move by Oracle. In the meantime, we're glad here at MuseGlobal that our rapidly deployed and highly cost-effective Smart Connector content solutions help them all to compete more effectively.

A Cloud Apart: MuseGlobal, Content Integration and Cloud Computing

The SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco last week was a great event for MuseGlobal to strut our stuff amongst the major and up-and-coming players in the content and software industry. While there was some ballyhoo about this being a new convergence of industry players, it's no secret that software and content companies have been joined at the hips for many, many years.

There was a fair amount of that "everything old is new again" atmosphere at NetGain, including the touting of "cloud computing" from major service providers such as Google, Oracle and Salesforce.com. Well, of course all of these companies provide very powerful software and services, but the cloud was with us even well before the Web became a reality. As soon as there were servers and client computers on networks the network cloud was being exploited to deliver high-value content services to major enterprises and, eventually, consumers. From that long-term perspective, you could say that content has lived in the clouds for a long time.

The difference today is that with more and more content staying in the network cloud instead of being downloaded into desktop applications and enterprise servers making the cloud a universal source of information for specific purposes becomes all the more important. After-the-fact integration of other important sources in desktop applications or through enterprise databases becomes harder when you're basing all of your content resources in the network. This means that you need to get all of the right content in the right place at the right time inside of network content serving applications.

While managing transparent access to content sources can be hard for some technologies to manage, MuseGlobal content integration technologies make getting comprehensive and unified content from any range of content sources in network-based content services easier than ever. Yet again, MuseGlobal was there before the idea of transparent access to diverse content sources had become a fad. We've been sussing out the details of how to connect to thousands of different kinds of databases, search engines, feeds, subscription content services and Web mining applications on the widest range of networks for more than a decade. The architecture that we've put into place to manage this simply and reliably in a way makes MuseGlobal a content cloud unto itself - and given our track record with major publishers and content technology companies around the world, allow me to say that we see ourselves as a cloud apart from the rest.

The nice thing about MuseGlobal OEM technology is that you can decide for yourself how you want to work with our content cloud. You can take in content from MuseGlobal into the back end of your own content cloud, or you can use our integration software to create a content cloud that surrounds your own core content delivery technologies. Best of all, you can tune which sources you want to present from MuseGlobal and how you want to filter and present them very easily. Vertical search engines? We're there and all over it before you know it. Business intelligence engines? Been there, done that. Consumer ecommerce portals? Our cloud will be raining content on products that they'll be eager to buy.

So when you think of cloud computing, remember that you need to think about how much of the right content it will take for your own platform to be the rainmaker on the networks of your choice. Don't settle for a drizzle of the sources that your clients want - let MuseGlobal help you to make your content own cloud the one that pours it on.

Comprehensive Federated Search for Enterprises – Tomorrow from SAP and Oracle, Today From Muse

As we make the rounds with analysts and platform partners there’s more chatter than ever about federated content for enterprises. It’s not that federated search in enterprises is any thing new, of course – Muse has been doing it for ten years in thousands of enterprise installations around the world. But the position of federated search as an enterprise solution is beginning to shift. Years ago we started introducing federated search to enterprise libraries – the specialists in search for their organizations – to bring together collections from across an organization into a common electronic library interface. But as search engines became more popular in enterprises as the “go-to” starting points for finding content in a wider variety of enterprise repositories all of a sudden search engines began to trigger a turf battle with the major player in enterprise content integration.

It’s all about desktop and server room dominance: whose platform will be on top as the one into which everyone else’s content and services integrate? It used to be that vendors such as Oracle and SAP were the key content repository builders for enterprises through applications built around the capabilities of their platforms. While search engines from FAST/Microsoft, Autonomy, Google and others have gained a lot of popularity as one-stop shopping for search needs, there’s a comprehensive list of sources and interfaces that enterprises want to see integrated into search services.

It’s not just a matter of breadth of sources, either: many tricky issues such as database and network security, being able to assemble the most relevant content and being able to build a wide variety of outputs rapidly and cost-effectively all are major factors in getting a federated search environment working properly. There’s a long list of items that your customers will want checked off before they’ll take your solution seriously.

In theory this should play into the hands of platforms like SAP and Oracle – and in fact both have been moving to develop federated search applications for their current platforms. But when they say “yes” to being able to do federated search, just how broad is that answer? Does it include being able to manage security and access issues on the widest array of enterprise and Web databases possible? Does it mean being able to traverse any kind of network configuration to bring together and disseminate federated search results – including even the latest mobile platforms and legacy network protocols? Can they assemble not just raw search results from each source but also just the right content that makes sense in a given context?

These are hard questions for any content platform vendor to answer – unless they happen to be one that uses content integration solutions from MuseGlobal. With a decade of experience in developing successful solutions using federated search Muse has integrated more kinds of search engines, feeds and databases with more kinds of configurations for more kinds of content platforms than any one else. Muse federated search solutions are designed for optimal maintenance with a minimum of administration and hassle-free security and network management for the widest possible range of configurations.

Best of all, you can decide just how to integrate Muse’s capabilities around your platform – as a “back end” solution that can feed in the results of federated searches into your own platform or as a framework that can enable your platform to provide well-organized federated search results from both your own platform and other platforms combined into your own custom front-end solutions. Either way your clients will see it as your solution all the way – and keep you in the driver’s seat as your clients choose who is best at federating whom.

So whether you’re using Oracle, SAP, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint Server, Google, Vignette, EMC/Documentum or another content platform to provide federated search solutions there’s one partner that you can call on that’s been there, done that and got just about every t-shirt there is to wear in content integration. It your time to spend trying to come up with a winning solution for federated search – why not spend it signing up more customers who will keep you on top? We’re glad to help you do it, too.