Choosing an appropriate middleware strategy is the most important decision organisations can make in the near-term, says Kelvin Reynolds, MD of Oracle SA.
"The one pivotal technology area that holds the promise of enabling IT is middleware," Reynolds told attendees of the opening day of the three-day SA Oracle User Group Conference 2005 at Emperors Palace east of Johannesburg.
Given the heterogeneous nature of most IT environments, Reynolds said organisations needed to choose an appropriate middleware strategy to protect current investments and support rapidly changing business needs into the future.
"Choose the right middleware platform, and it does not matter what applications you choose because they will be interoperable," he said.
Reynolds claimed that selecting the right middleware would enable organisations to keep their options open in terms of hardware, operating system and applications.
"Get it right now, and you will have developed a flexible platform that will avoid vendor lock-in and provide the opportunity to combine in-house developments with vendor applications and choose whether or not to outsource IT," he said.
Warning that vendor lock-in was a potential drawback of competitors in the middleware space, Reynolds emphasised it was not part of Oracle`s strategy.
"Middleware should allow organisations to extract information from any source, combine this information accurately, and render this information in any format on any device," he said.
Reynolds emphasised the importance of choosing a middleware strategy that embraced open standards and service-oriented architecture as well as facilitated grid computing.
"Rather than ripping and replacing, fix and develop your architecture by making the right middleware choice because this will enable you to exploit existing environments as well as prepare for the next generation of applications," he advised.
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