The Demo Of The Day

The name is a bit long but it makes a lot of sense when you dig in to the details.  What this is is the realization of something the UCM folks were talking about doing at last year’s OpenWorld, integrating Real Time Decisioning in to UCM to create targeting and personalization.

The demo, which basically selected an appropriate banner ad to display as we surfed a site studio web site, uses all information available to decide which ad to show.  For anonymous users that may be just their location based on IP, perhaps their browser or operating system.  For authenticated users that could also include data from their UCM profile, or if say Siebel is configured your entire profile and user history.

What’s also cool is that the configuration can learn on it’s own.  You don’t have to figure out whether your mac users are going to respond better to one piece of content than your PC ones.  Real Time Decisioning will figure that out for you, adapt to market changes and allow you to run tests to see how users respond.

Where it goes beyond being just a really powerful personalization engine though is when you factor in the “Multichannel” word in the title.  With this set up a user could theoretically log in to your web site, search for something on your web site and then perhaps call you.  If your call center is also using Real Time Decisioning(what it was originally designed for) the operator could automatically be alerted to what the caller was looking for, or even better yet, predict what the operator might want to give the caller when they get on the phone.  All of this would happen seamlessly and would adapt over time autonomously.

It’s sort like a big brother, only a really nice one that’s trying to help you out.

Aqualogic User Interaction

I twittered on this quite a bit during the session, but I had the opportunity to catch the strategy and vision for Web Center User Interaction.  The “User Interaction” part of the title is what interested me the most.  Whenever you see those two worlds(along with web center), you’re usually talking about the product formerly known as AquaLogic.

I am a pretty big AquaLogic fan.  First off many of my clients use User Interaction, which automatically makes me a bit partial.  Second though, I really like the architecture and what it’s designed to do.  ALUI has a number of features, but if I was to sum up basically what it “did” in nutshell is;  it allows you to tunnel other, non-portal, web applications as services.  Those services can then be surfaced as portlets in the container.  No java, no 168, no web parts…point it at your application and go.

The neat thing about that design though is that those portlets can be configured to render asyncronously, basically using AJAX.  Fundamentally once you have that ability the portal container becomes unessecary, you can remote-script your portlets(really non-portal web applications) on to just about any web page.  That’s the principle behind the ALUI ensamble product, which was known as an “Enterprise Mashup” application. 

Oracle appears to have big plans for Ensamble and is planning on using is as what they called a “UI Service Bus” with Web Center.  Basically allowing them to drag and drop various web applications, tunneled through ALUI or Web Center services on to thier Web Center pages or really any web application.  In fact in the demo they dropped an application on to an IPhone.

The Register has learned from individuals close to the company that BEA’s new owner Oracle is merging the AquaLogic and WebLogic professional service teams. Oracle is also splitting the AquaLogic products between “web products” – user interaction, collaboration and the Web 2.0 suite – and AquaLogic business process management (BPM).

So no big surprises there, merging the professional services for Web and AquaLogic makes a great deal of sense(shouldn’t BEA have done that already??).  And the “splitting” of Web Products and BPM probably just means those products are being aligned with similar groups within Oracle.

What really got my attention though was:

It is understood the web products may be taken over by the Oracle team running Stellent content management, acquired by Oracle in November 2006

So the UCM team might get AquaLogic?  Wow, that’s a bit of a surprise.  I personally had not given AquaLogic’s future a lot of thought, figuring their product teams would continue to operate as normal much as Stellent’s did.  There’s of course a big “may” in that quote though, for all we know officially they could be getting ready to launch SQL Developer Web 2.0 Portal.

It’s a little funny for me actually as one of the first Stellent projects was actually a Stellent/PlumTree implementation.  At the time they were both relatively smaller companies with some pretty cool ideas and applications.  It’s crazy that they could become part of the same product line now.  Amazing how quickly things change.

Oracle Universal Content Portal?

With that little tid-bit comes the game of what-ifs.  I’m actually working on a project right now using both ALUI and UCM/Site Studio, so this news has really peeked my interest.  Up until now I’ve more or less figured that the BEA applications would become part of Fusion-Middleware, probably joining forces with their Oracle counterparts.  Oracle has made it pretty clear that they intend on developing integrations for all applications within the middleware stack, but if AquaLogic becomes a part of UCM could we expect a more unified solution?  

Could ALUI become the new presentation layer for UCM?  For Site Studio?  We’re probably a little way out from hearing, much less seeing anything, but I’m actually pretty excited about the BEA buy now.