Oracle updates Tuxedo transaction processing platform

A new release of the venerable Tuxedo transaction processing platform is now available, Oracle announced Wednesday.

Tuxedo has a better than 20-year history, beginning as a project at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. The platform plays a similar role as an application server, but does so for C, C++, and COBOL applications, such as those written for mainframes, allowing them to be "rehosted" on standard hardware systems. Tuxedo is running under the hood of many telecommunications, financial services, and e-commerce systems.

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The new release, Tuxedo 10g R3, is the product's first update since Oracle acquired  its previous owner, middleware giant BEA Systems, last year.

New features include improved integration with Oracle's Coherence, Identity and Access Management Suite and SOA Suite products. In addition, Tuxedo 10g R3 has been certified for use with Oracle's clusterware product to improve system availability.

Oracle has also released an accompanying technology, Oracle Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) 10g R3.

SALT, which allows Tuxedo applications to be exposed as Web services, as well as call out to Web services, now supports SCA (service component architecture), a set of specifications for developing SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications and systems.

The company decided to add support for SCA, which is fairly new, through a "combination of strategic anticipation coupled with a growing voice in our customer base," said Mike Piech, senior director with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Customers who are using Tuxedo version 8 or 9 would be the targets for an upgrade to the new release, Piech said.

None of the new capabilities introduce dependencies on other Oracle technologies, he added.

It's no surprise that Oracle would move fairly quickly to add features to Tuxedo, suggested Redmonk analyst James Governor.

"Tuxedo remains a high-value transaction broker with plenty of customers, particularly in the telco company space," Governor said via e-mail. "Telco is a vertical that Oracle long coveted and now finally dominates through the BEA acquisition. Ironically, even BEA took its eye off the ball with Tuxedo for a while, but in more recent times it's been getting the attention it deserves. Oracle evidently decided to sustain that regained momentum."