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A recurring theme in most sessions by Oracle are their plans to move to creating hardware/software appliances that match their software and SUN hardware to provide a plug and play installation of products.  I’ve noted this briefly in a previous post and wanted to return to it because it raises interesting issues.

Oracle’s justification for appliances is that by controlling the hardware/software configuration at the source, they can provide a more consistent and higher quality installation for clients.  The repeatedly refer to the Apple model and how it provides additional simplicity and more satisfaction for Apple customers.  The other benefit they see is that they can specially tune the solutions to provide higher performance.

This rationale behind this approach makes some significant assumptions.

One assumption is that the needs of a retail user and an organization are very similar and that Oracle will significantly improve customer satisfaction with appliances.  I would question whether a business can specify its needs well enough that Oracle can accurately configure their new appliance effectively.  It is fairly easy to select components such as database version, application version, and middleware version.  What is more complex is configuring this for use in a specific production environment that is dependent on customizations, reports, integrations, varying user loads and unexpected application configuration settings.  All of these would seem to call for additional configuration.  If the client’s staff did not do the initial installation how will they know enough to do these changes?

A second assumption is that initial setup and configuration is a large issue to businesses.  Perhaps for smaller organizations with limited staff that might be the case.  However most organizations struggle not with initial setup and configuration but final configuration when they are going into production which is after much data conversion, system testing and user acceptance testing.

A third assumption is that configuring a multi-tier, multi-server environment can be done well before client delivery.  It’s one thing to get an Apple laptop configured for easy use but much more complex to configure three database servers with RAC, and dual Middleware servers with failover capabilities.

Perhaps the reason these assumptions might not apply is  that Oracle is not assuming that the client staff will do any configuration and that instead Oracle will remotely manage and configure these same appliances.  That’s a possibility but will raise a number of issues for clients who might feel uneasy about Oracle being remotely  in charge of their environment configuration.

Another reason is that I may be over-estimating the level of configuration that Oracle is contemplating.  However, their use of the word “tuning” implies more than just installation and basic setup of a system before delivery.

Knowing Oracle, they will deliver on this vision, so the real question is how will it change the marketplace when they do?  At this point there is much more to understand but the entire Oracle ecosphere of Partners, Competitors and Customers should be considering the impacts and what it will mean to their business.

Stay tuned…