‘Oaths of allegiance’ sworn by Petris/Wipro and Pointcross to Microsoft’s Upstream Reference Architecture (now officially ‘MURA’) shed light on what it all really means. A white paper1 from Petris/Wipro describes PetrisWinds OneTouch as ‘taking advantage of’ MURA. This itself is curious since OneTouch was announced in May 2009 (Oil IT Journal) while MURA’s official roll-out was in March 2010 when it was described as ‘currently at a very early stage of development.’ In the Petris/Wipro context, MURA is something of a framework in a framework and appears to mean the use of Microsoft tools including SharePoint, Silverlight, FAST and Web Parts from third parties such as OSIsoft. We conclude that OneTouch with MURA inside is pretty much the same thing as it was before MURA was mooted!
Turning to Pointcross, a similar picture emerges. Pointcross was adapting its Orchestra framework to the upstream back in 2005 as the ‘Oil Company in a Box’ (Oil IT Journal December 2005.) The company became a MURA founder late in 2009. The Pointcross whitepaper2 similarly enumerates Microsoft technologies as above, adding Biztalk and Microsoft Office Business Applications, all of which blend into its new Integrated E&P Suites (IEPS).
For MURA to mature into something close to its marketing promise i.e. to provide a definitive mapping across ISA/ISO/WITS/PRODML and more, the next step ought to be a merger of the frameworks—both the above and the ever growing list of others (OpenSpirit, iStore …). It this possible—let along likely? It would be fun to be a fly on the wall in a MURA meet. We wonder if the talk is of objects, relations, of data footprints and mappings. But we suspect that the debate is more about how to craft the next press release promising the integration ‘moon,’ while treading on a minimum number of partner’s toes! More from www.oilit.com/links/1007_22.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.