On September 2, 2008, Oracle announced the pending acquisition of ClearApp, a leading provider of application management solutions for composite applications. The company is based in Mountain View (California) and their QuickVision product is a very advanced management tool for composite applications, especially BPEL-based and Portal-based applications. The transaction is expected to close before the end of the year—pending closing conditions.
According to the announcement
ClearApp addresses the increasingly difficult task of managing composite applications built on SOA platforms by providing visibility of business services across all related application components. The combination of ClearApp products and Oracle Enterprise Manager is expected to provide customers with a comprehensive application management solution that delivers enhanced service levels, reduced system down-time and improved return on SOA investments.
In a letter to existing customers, Leng Leng Tan, Vice President, Applications and Systems Management, said
ClearApp addresses the IT visibility gap by discovering and modeling the functional dependencies inherent in SOA environments. With the ClearApp solution, customers are able to discover and model end-to-end business services and component dependencies in runtime, monitor business service performance, and diagnose performance issues quickly. ClearApp’s capabilities are expected to extend Oracle’s application management solutions to provide visibility of transactions across all application components
QuickVision is a complementary addition to existing products and the acquisitions in the application management domain. Oracles pre-acquisition coverage of application management space include :
- Oracle Real User Experience Insight (from the Moniforce acquisition) uses a state-of-the-art network protocol analysis technology to analyze performance and availability as well as user behavior. It has no impact on the performance of your applications and requires no changes to them.
- The Oracle Enterprise Manager App Server Diagnostic Pack helps analyze where processing time is spent (servlet, JSP, EJB, JDBC…). AD4J (from the Auptyma acquisition) provides deep insight into the JVM. It provides information about line numbers and call stack of the slow methods.
- The Oracle Database Diagnostic and Tuning packs help follow the diagnostics trail into the database.
Commenting on where the acquisition fits in the product stack, William Vambenepe an architect for the application and middleware management of Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division says that
[For] composite applications (for example one that makes use of a BPEL process to orchestrate services deployed on different application servers), then you would have a hard time finding which application server to focus on. The QuickVision product fills that gap, taking a BPEL process from its invocation point into all its successive steps and into the code that the different steps invoke. So you can see if the problem is within the BPEL execution.
However, according an article on the acquisition David Worthington of SD times
Bloomberg commented that the acquisition raises more questions than it answers, noting that Oracle had already acquired a group of companies that develop similar products, such as Auptyma, BEA Systems, Confluent Software and Moniforce.
Bloomberg questioned how many management vendors Oracle must acquire before it has a coherent SOA management story. [..] “Will Oracle be able to take this cobbled-together story and compete both with the established incumbents like HP and IBM Tivoli [...]” he asked. He added that Oracle has experience in assimilating acquired technologies and for taking care of customers that come along as a result.
More information about the acquisition is available from this page and the press release. More information about the QuickVision product can be found on the ClearApp site.