Oracle's Ellison says SOA migration rate is 'slow'

According to a new report in CIO, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said what many vendors may already know but not want to admit -- that SOA adoption is a long-term process, not a quick fix.

Oddly enough, Ellison says he based this observation on news articles, versus reflecting an inside view on trends he is seeing across his customer base.

Ellison noted that being the fundamentally new computer architecture it is, SOA will take time. It "takes about 10 to 20 years before [you can] rewrite all of your applications," he added.

Of course, one of the beauties of SOA is that legacy applications do not have to be rewritten -- these can remain untouched, with only interfaces being changed. Nevertheless, the SOA evolution will likely be a gradual process, in which service-enabled islands will evolve and eventually be federated together.

While slow-moving, the SOA evolution so far has been great for Oracle's middleware business. In its latest quarterly results, Oracle's earnings from software sales were up by 35 percent compared to the same period last year, to US$1.3 billion -- its best showing in 10 years.