Don Deutsch, Vice President for Standards,
Strategy, and Architecture at Oracle
Open for Business
THE BENEFITS OF ORACLE’S 32-YEAR COMMITMENT TO INDUSTRY STANDARDS
oday’s most successful software architectures reflect the IT
industry’s push toward open standards. Consider the role the
internet plays in business. People the world over can connect
to this worldwide network thanks to the existence of open,
nonproprietary standards such as CGI, HTML, HTTP, and Java.
Application software vendors such as Oracle, working with open
source developers and standards bodies, are collaborating to
bring this same degree of interoperability to enterprise software.
Don Deutsch, vice president for standards, strategy, and
architecture at Oracle, believes that the prevalence of open
standards is due to more than their use on the consumer
internet. Businesses and governments, as well as consumers,
have continually expressed their preference for open, flexible, and extensible information systems. “Open standards
protect customer investments by reducing vendor lock-in,”
Deutsch states. “Building enterprise software around standard
interfaces enables customers to easily extend those systems
as their businesses evolve—without major retooling.”
BOB ADLER
According to Deutsch, Oracle has made a significant
commitment to advancing open, interoperable standards
across the entire Oracle product family. Hundreds of
Oracle engineers work in more than 65 standards-setting
forums in nearly 300 technical working groups to keep the
Oracle products extensible and compatible with prevailing
industry standards.
Oracle also contributes to many open source projects, and
hundreds of Oracle engineers are part of open source communities, developing code that is freely available in open
source versions. In addition, Oracle develops and offers open
source products such as Oracle Berkeley DB, currently processing transactions in more than 200 million deployments
around the world.
DEFINING TERMS, COUNTING COSTS
Historically, the primary motivation for adopting standards-based software—and, to a certain extent, for adopting open
source software products—has been to minimize integration
costs and avoid vendor lock-in. Deutsch cautions, “Unless
the underlying technology fully supports open standards for
all interoperability purposes, the integration of these technologies with the existing and future technical infrastructure
will be more difficult and could create new lock-in effects.”
Whether an organization selects open source or conventional
software, the best value comes through optimizing developer
productivity, providing a reliable and scalable infrastructure,
and creating an open, extensible platform for the future.
