You CAN get there from here

A big competitor of my company likes to buy other companies and then suck their customers dry on maintenance. They really don’t care much about keeping those customers happy or keeping them in the family, they only want the maintenance base to fund future efforts.

But Oracle, like the Borg, wants to assimilate. They want to keep customers in the family. Maintenance is great, to be sure, but happy customers are paying customers are upsell customers are references. Happy is good.

One of the acquired customer groups is the Sun customers. There are all sorts of products that Sun sold, of course, but the ones I care about are the identity and access customers. When Oracle acquired Sun, they began the process of deciding which products from both companies would stick, and which ones wouldn’t. The products to be let go were deemed “non-strategic.” The ultimate aim was to create a truly best of breed selection. In other words, cherry pick the best possible components for the future offering. So Oracle Role Manager gave way to Sun Role Manager (formerly Vaau), the provisioning connectors became a mix and match exercise, the Fedlet and Secure Token Server stuck, and Sun Identity Manager was put into maintenance mode in favor of Oracle Identity Manager (same for the access management).

Oracle’s standard for workflow is BPEL, the evolution of BPM. It’s all about process, order, logical steps, open standards. This won out over SIM’s proprietary Express scripting. Now when old SIM customers ask about the level of effort to migrate from SIM to OIM, they tell me, “We have this many users. How long will it take?”

My standard reply is, “I don’t give a darn how many users you have. How many workflow definitions do you have, and how ugly are they?”

One or two step approvals are fairly easy to translate. But big, hairy workflows with lots of callouts and circular logic, exceptions, escalations, and so on, these get nasty.

There are migration tools available. People here this term and say, “Cool, I can feed my old workflows into the tools and get shiny, new workflows.” No, wrong, not gonna happen.

The migration tools, which are free, do this one thing very well: they create an inventory of what there is to be migrated. They help point the way. They will NOT eat your SIM architecture and spit out OIM. But they definitely help. In the end, it’s a fairly manual process of redesign. Also remember, the way you did it the first time is probably in need of an overhaul anyway. I guarantee that if you COULD wave a magic wand and turn Express logic into BPEL, you’d inherit a bunch of badness. A migration, if you can charitably call it that, is an opportunity to re-examine your processes, and refine them, make them better, stronger, faster.

You can get there. You might need some help. In fact, I’ll bet you will. But you will get there. I would never lie to you.