William Vambenepe

I work as an architect for the application and middleware management part of Oracle Enterprise Manager. My focus is on creating the best possible IT management solution that's driven by the needs and capabilities of the applications. My blog covers that, as well as a wider range of related topics, such as virtualization, automation, modeling, ITSM, BSM, BTM, standards, SOA, cloud computing, semantic Web and Web technologies. The places where these threads intersect is where most of the potential for dramatically increased business benefits from IT resides.

Before coming to Oracle in 2007, I worked in HP’s software division for nine years on a variety of products ranging from high-resolution imaging (OpenPix) to middleware (e-speak, Bluestone, HP-AS) and, for the last five years, systems management. There, as a "distinguished technologist" in the BTO group (previously known as OpenView), I combined architectural and standard-related activities. On the latter side, I managed the software standards strategy and was directly involved in many Web services and management-related standard efforts. Towards the end of my HP tenure, I was focusing on the CMDB product, called Universal CMDB.

My work email address follows the firstname.lastname @oracle.com format. My personal email address is my first name @vambenepe.com and I'm @vambenepe on Twitter. You can also call me (if you're game for a small challenge).

And, of course, the views I express on this site are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.

Exalogic, EC2-on-OVM, Oracle Linux: The Oracle Open World Early Recap

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Among all the announcements at Oracle Open World so far, here is a summary of those I was the most impatient to blog about.

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

Introducing the Oracle Cloud API

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Oracle recently published a Cloud management API on OTN and also submitted a subset of the API to the new DMTF Cloud Management working group. The OTN specification, titled “Oracle Cloud Resource Model API”, is available here.

CMDB In The Cloud: Not Your Father's CMDB

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Bernd Harzog recently wrote a blog entry to examine whether “the CMDB [is] irrelevant in a Virtual and Cloud based world“. If I can paraphrase, his conclusion is that there will be something that looks like a CMDB but the current CMDB products are ill-equipped to fulfill that function. Here are the main reasons he gives for this prognostic:

Dear Cloud API, Your Fault Line is Showing

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Most APIs are like hospital gowns. They seem to provide good coverage, until you turn around. I am talking about the dreadful state of fault reporting in remote APIs, from Twitter to Cloud interfaces. They are badly described in the interface documentation and the implementations often don’t even conform to what little is documented.

From VMware and Salesforce.com (VMforce) to VMware and Google: VMware's PaaS Milestones

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Three weeks ago, VMware and Salesforce.com launched VMforce, a Salesforce-hosted platform as a service (PaaS) solution based on VMware runtime technology and force.com application services. In my analysis of the announcement, I wrote: "VMware wants us to know they are under the covers because of course they have much larger aspirations than to be a provider to Salesforce.com.

Two Versions of a Protocol is One Too Many

Monday, May 10, 2010

There is always a temptation, when facing a hard design decision in the process of creating an interface or a protocol, to produce two (or more) versions. It’s sometimes a good idea, as a way to explore where each one takes you so you can make a more informed choice. But we know how this invariably ends up. Documents get published that arguably should not. It’s even harder in a standard working group, where someone was asked (or at least encouraged) by the group to create each of the alternative specifications.

PaaS Portability Challenges And the VMforce Example

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The VMforce announcement is a great step for SalesForce.com, in large part because it lets them address a recurring concern about the force.com PaaS offering: the lack of portability of Apex applications. Now they can be written using Java and Spring instead.

The Battle of the Cloud Frameworks: Application Servers Redux?

Monday, May 3, 2010

The battle of the cloud frameworks has started, and it will look a lot like the battle of the application servers which played out over the last decade and a half. cloud frameworks (which manage IT automation and runtime outsourcing) are to the programmable datacenter what application servers are to the individual IT server. In the longer term, these battlefronts may merge, but for now we’ve been transported back in time, to the early days of Web programming. The underlying dynamic is the same.

Waiting for Events (in Cloud APIs)

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Events/alerts/notifications have been a central concept in IT management at least since the first SNMP trap was emitted, and probably even long before that. And yet they are curiously absent from all the cloud management APIs/protocols. If you think that’s because “THE CLOUD CHANGES EVERYTHING” then you may have to think again. Over the last few days, two of the most experienced practitioners of Cloud computing pointed out that this omission is a real pain in the neck.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SaaS but Were Afraid to Ask

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

What makes one Web applications “Software as a Service” (SaaS) and another a “plain old Web application” (POWA)? Or is there no such distinction?

Wouldn’t it be convenient if we had an answer that has some functional relevance? Here are the different axis on which I (unsuccessfully) tried to project Web applications to sort them between SaaS and POWA: