I have always had a love of sailing.
As a young married couple, one of the first "investments" we made was a 14 foot Glastron Alpha sail boat. Basically, it was an oversized Sunfish, familiar to anyone who has visited a seaside resort. It had a modified gaff rigged sail arrangement. The controlling lines were simple and easy to understand -- one to lift the sail and one to trim it in or out to catch the wind. The setup was simple and allowed for a single person to rig and launch. My wife was a good sport about it at the time, but later pointed out that we didn't have a spare nickel and had little business buying a boat.
The great thing about this boat was that, with no lessons at all, one could learn the ancient mysteries of powering a vessel by the wind. By learning to tack, one could actually sail in the same general direction from which the wind is blowing. Further, one could move fairly fast, heel over and generally evoke squeals of delight (or terror) from the crewmate along for the ride.
This style of boats is also forgiving of mistakes. And, in any event, there's a short drop to the water when the inevitable gust of wind catches one by surprise. Always wear lifejackets, boys and girls.
Despite my wife's initial misgivings, we owned the boat for close to twenty years. Each summer we'd tow it behind the car down to Cape Cod. Each of our three children learned to sail on it -- a wonderful skill to be able to provide them.
So, I suppose you can guess where this is going. As life moved along, we (really I) concluded that a 14 foot day-sailer wasn't nearly big enough for the family. As luck would have it, a 27 foot Catalina came on the market in the next town over. The first of the two happiest days in a boat-owner's life soon followed: the day you buy it.
The Catalina is a very nice family boat. This one happened to have been completely upgraded for racing. High performance winches, really good sails, electronics, and the list went on. The owner was moving to Utah and was, as they say, "motivated" to accept the only offer I could afford.
We sailed out of Salem harbor on Massachusetts' north shore. This is a well protected, yet large harbor area with Manchester to the north, Baker and Misery Islands to the east and Marblehead Neck to the south. Occasionally, if the wind was right and the day promising, we'd head further south toward Boston harbor or southeast off Gloucester. It was a great family experience.
My first and last sails were with my oldest son. On the first, we foolishly picked an ominous day, with low clouds scudding across the harbor and foam spraying off building whitecaps. Wisely, we didn't last long. On our last day, we had sailed south to Boston on a broad reach and then came about to head home. We were close hauled on a port tack and had the boat trimmed so well that we could take our hands off the tiller and she didn't veer even one degree off course. The boat was happy and we were thrilled. Although more than ten years ago, I remember the moment as yesterday. It was truly magical. We sold her shortly thereafter (the second happiest boat-owner's day). The last of our children had left for college, I lost my crew, and the time had passed for sailing.
I build wooden model ships as a hobby. I've done three thus far. These are referred to as "plank on frame" construction from kits where the individual hull planks are bent, one by one, usually in two layers, over a frame. Following this, the superstructure is built (railings, masts, deck hardware, cannon carriages, etc.), followed by rigging the masts. The last step takes many, many hours to complete. The standing rigging consists of a hundred or more lines, each one takes about ten to fifteen minutes to dry-fit, place, and tie off. The finished model is anywhere from twenty to thirty inches in length.
I find it very relaxing, but can only do it for relatively short stretches of time. It takes a lot of concentration, and even with magnifying goggles, the eyestrain counterbalances the relaxation after a couple hours. The first one I made was from scratch using solid hull construction. Next came "The Wasp" from a kit about 15 years ago. Once I finish my current project, the "Half Moon," in a couple more hours work, my next will be the "Charles W. Morgan."
Other than the pure pleasure of building the ships, I also frequently find myself imagining what it must have been like to actually sail a square-rigged ship. They were vastly more complicated than either of the two I sailed, even though the basic principles of moving a vessel through the water with wind power are identical. Some clipper ships had over twenty sails. Even slower working ships like the whaler "Charles W. Morgan" would have more than a dozen.
Each of these sails would have upwards of nine or more individual lines to lift, trim, and set to the wind. In Eric Jay Dolin's book Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, the author describes the novice deck hand's experience:
One of the most daunting tasks was becoming fluent in the language of the sea. Every part of a ship had a name. The green hand not only had to know where to find the bowsprit, the jib boom, the catheads, the lower deadeyes, the fore-topgallant mast, the spanker, the booby hatch, the lashing rail, the hawsepipe, and the mizzen yard, but also what they were for. Every one of the ropes in the rigging, which at first glance must have looked like a distressed spiderweb, had a name and a function, which had to be memorized, as did all the many sails the ship carried.
This book, by the way, is a gripping history of the New England whaling industry from early on-shore harvesting of stranded pods, to multi-year journeys yielding thousands of barrels of whale oil, to the declining days precipitated in no small measure by the indiscriminate decimation of the Pacific whale population.
The experience of sailing one of these ships was at once exhilarating and terrifying. Running before a stiff wind, galloping across the peaks of the ocean waves with the sun on one's face must have been thrilling. That memory would have faded quickly when the seaman was clinging to a bucking spar thirty or forty feet in the air, during a freezing, howling gale, chopping ice from the lines and sails in order to set them while passing through the Straits of Magellan around Cape Horn. On the outward leg, they were sailing east to west into the prevailing wind of the "Furious Fifties" -- latitudes below 50 degrees -- where the storms are frequent and seamen with careless footing or hands too frozen to grip the mast were quickly swept away in the frigid water before they even reached the Pacific whaling grounds.
For the past several months, I have been visiting U.S. cities to present Oracle's strategy for Oracle Fusion Middleware to current and prospective customers. I really enjoy interacting with customers, learning of their business challenges, understanding what solutions they are seeking, and relating Oracle capabilities to these requirements. The objective of the presentation is to map our Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy and directions directly onto the challenges that our customers experience and urgently need to solve.
While on the plane traveling to and from these meetings, I've had a bit of time to reflect on how history and the human experience tend to repeat. You have doubtlessly heard the expression: "Those who don't study history tend to repeat it." However, I believe that our very human nature requires that we solve problems in ways that are intuitively familiar.
Square-rigged ships solved the problems of power versus speed versus variable wind direction by creating an assembly of specialized sails -- each designed to a specific purpose to compliment the whole for optimal effect. The same principle applies to software today.
Years ago, I worked for a small New England software company that created a truly leading-edge workflow product. It was messaging based, utilized a graphical workflow creation interface, and had easy integration capabilities. While somewhat successful, it never really achieved "breakout" status. I've come to understand that the reason for this was that it was, fundamentally, a stand-alone, niche product. It was, while unique and attractive, a single-purpose tool. It functioned well enough and was easy enough to deploy. However it lacked the sophistication and power that comes from being well integrated within a larger suite of complementary functions.
Today, Oracle offers a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)-based workflow function well integrated within Oracle Fusion Middleware. Today, I use many of the same words in my presentation as I did years ago to describe the business solutions for which this workflow is well suited. Yet, a dramatic difference is the synergistic power that is realized when such a tool leverages other equally powerful and complementary features throughout the suite. This synergy is one of the primary reasons why the Oracle BPEL Process Manager has been so rapidly adopted by our customers.
This is made possible through Oracle's strong adherence to the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture in our product design. By doing so, we enable our customers to leverage a vast array of functional capability in ways that is only limited by the imagination.
Years before the workflow product, I worked on Wang's Document Imaging products. We had originally intended to create specific vertical market "applets" for Medical Records, Insurance Claims, Loan Origination, and the like. A very smart industry analyst told us, "Spend the effort to make the product as flexible as possible. Your customers will leverage that flexibility to build solutions that you never dreamed of."
Now, years later, Oracle Fusion Middleware is providing exactly that kind of flexibility because of its rich functionality, slavish adherence to industry standards, and integration with Oracle's business applications and database.
An area of the Oracle Fusion Middleware that is of particular interest to me is Identity Management. Because of the flexibility of the suite and our compliance with industry standards, customers have been able to select the particular solution they require and then gradually expand to other areas as the initial "pain point" is addressed. I continue to marvel at the momentum with which our acquired Identity offerings hit the ground. History has repeated itself again and again, as these highly capable stand-alone products achieve synergistic leverage with the rest of our Identity Management suite.
As a result, I think that we will see some emerging trends in the coming year:
- Enterprise deployers will have integrated "identity silos" through Virtual Directory access methods. These deployers will have achieved significant benefits from establishing disciplined Single Sign-On and Access Management practices.
- These deployers will continue to leverage automated provisioning to achieve more rapid user productivity and more rigorous controls over user access to applications and data.
- Enterprise deployers will turn their attention in a more focused way on compliance solutions addressing industry and regulatory requirements. These solutions will begin to reverse the reactive position that many companies have been in with respect to compliance issues. This reversal will enable them to use their compliance practices as competitive differentiators of a high-quality organization.
- This last point will impact partners of these market-leading firms who will be required to measure up and prove their own best practices to maintain their partnership status.
- Finally, because we are in a connected world, these practices will drive a global trend towards rigorous compliance audit reporting across all industries, as well as private, and public sectors.
We all need to overcome obstacles in order to be more productive in our work. Whether it be sailing into the teeth of a gale, or competing fiercely in a twenty-first century global market segment, we need to use the same principles today as before: assemble a suite of flexible tools that meet the challenge in ways that are unique to strengthen one's own competitive position.
