Oracle has just made two major announcements around Tuxedo and Mainframe Migrations. 

Tuxedo is Oracle’s application environment for the non-Java languages. Like most “legacy” transaction servers, Tuxedo provides major large enterprise functionality to the programming languages prior to Java. Tuxedo had focused on C/C++ and COBOL until now. Among a couple of innovations, the most exciting news in the just-announced Oracle Tuxedo 11g release is the support for Ruby and Python. This pushes these newer languages immediately up the enterprise performance and reliability scale, making them comparable to COBOL, ABAP, and NATURAL.

The huge challenge for Oracle after this move will be to get access to the Ruby and Python developer communities. Most of them are looking more at open source runtime environments than at heavyweight enterprise transaction environments. However, this latest move by Oracle may resonate with these young open source natives, who’ve gone from university to their first job at banks, insurance companies, and other traditional mainframe shops. Ruby and Python on Tuxedo could be appropriate choices for those developers who want to move stuff off a mainframe but don’t want to get into COBOL on the new platform again.

Last Saturday, at the Silicon Valley Product Camp, I was part of a panel on PM metrics. Any topic that's at the same time important and unsettled keeps you thinking long after the panel, so not surprisingly, almost a week later, I'm still chewing on it. Here's an observation I'll make today, after further pondering:

You know when you're doing well as a PM when someone yells at you for getting a persona, user story, use case, or task analysis wrong.

Understanding the world from the standpoint of the individual buyer or user is one of the primary responsibility of PM. According to some schools of thought, it's the core responsibility, especially since no one else in a technology company is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and distributing these deep customer insights. (There are other core responsibilities, too, related to the company's business and the technology itself.)

That information may look academic, but it should be immediately pertinent in very important ways. Understanding the way in which people in a variety of roles assess, purchase, and adopt technology is critical for making smart decisions about everything from product design to the product roadmap, from crafting messaging to choosing marketing channels. Unless you live in a Soviet-style command economy, in which manufacturing 3,000 left shoes is a problem for the consumer, not the producer, customer insights need to inform both strategic and tactical decisions.

In product marketing, you always want to sound like the smartest person in the room. However, you shouldn't prove it with marketing messages that only you fully understand.

At last, someone who can understand my brilliance
Colleague Mary Gerush and I are working on a market segmentation for requirements tools. It's a great excuse to get into a lot of very interesting conversations about some very deep topics. The requirements market is in transition, from an era of heavy-weight tools designed to address information management challenges, to something very different. (You'll have to stay tuned to find out what the new market looks like.) We're starting from scratch, with no particular attachment to the traditional terms and concepts for describing what these tools are supposed to do.

That's the entree into the very interesting conversations. Vendors in this space, whatever it is, are very smart people who think about the shape of the requirements market all day long. Not surprisingly, their opinions about the market, which are reflected in their marketing messages, are very smart, too. In fact, in a couple of occasions, I wonder if they were being a little too smart.

Hi, I'd like to share part two of a recent discussion that I had with Martin Schindler, Editor of Silicon.de. See part one here in case you missed it.

Martin Schindler: You indicated earlier that interest in third-party maintenance has increased since SAP wanted to make its Enterprise Support basically mandatory. Is this just excitement or real demand?

Stefan Ried: Yes, interest has increased. We're also seeing that from the vendor side. In addition to Rimini Street, which already offers maintenance for SAP systems, there is also Aptech, netCustomer, the Spinnaker Management Group, and Versytec, which are today limited to PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. The vendor space has developed further, and the list of SAP-supporting vendors will soon become longer. Finally, it makes sense to ask the larger systems integrators, such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, IBM Global Services, and Siemens (SIS), which are also the largest SAP integrators, to quote for offering SAP third-party maintenance.

Martin Schindler: This is interesting. We've read little about such offers.

Stefan Ried: These integrators naturally don't make a lot of noise about these things, as they also have a partner relationship with SAP, of course. At the end of the day, the demand will be balanced with the supply — and if more customers request SAP maintenance from their systems integrator, they will start to offer it.

Martin Schindler: Is this profitable for integrators?