Oracle pitches SOA at conference

SAN FRANCISCO -- Just as rival BEA Systems did a few weeks ago at its own event in the same city, Oracle is pitching wares for SOA at its industry conference this week.

The company is positioning SOA as a major theme at the Oracle OpenWorld conference and on Monday unveiled Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3, featuring governance. SOA based on Oracle's Fusion Middleware platform was the focus of a keynote presentation Tuesday by Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of server technologies development.

"There's a new architecture that's emerged, which today in the industry is called services-oriented architecture," Kurian said.

"Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle's integrated and standards-based set of tools and middleware to allow you to develop enterprise applications on a services-oriented architecture," Kurian said. Fusion, he said, features technologies to build a services-oriented application and set business rules. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), meanwhile, provides a visual or declarative way to build service-oriented applications based on Java, Kurian said. He cited Monster.com as a user of Fusion Middleware to enable SOA.

Analyst Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management Software at IDC lauded Oracle's SOA strategy. "I think Oracle's in a really strong position given the ownership that they have of the application stack," Ballou said. But she questioned whether Oracle has gaps to fill related to application lifecycle management for services.

"The questions I have as an application lifecycle management analyst are around specific approaches in developing services for test and quality management, change management and governance," Ballou said.

Kurian's presentation offered little by way of new products. But he did unveil Oracle WebCenter Suite.

"WebCenter provides [users] with a way to build very sophisticated Web 2.0-based user interaction environments," Kurian said.

A component of the Fusion Middleware platform, WebCenter Suite breaks down boundaries between Web-based portals, enterprise applications, and Web 2.0 technologies to enable rapid development of context-sensitive work processes, Oracle said. Integration can happen between mashups, Wikis, VOIP, RSS feeds, discussion forums and online Web content publishing. The product features a JavaServer Faces (JSF)- and Oracle ADF-based framework for embedding rich, AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components and content into JSF applications, enabling a dynamic and context-rich user experience, the company said.

Due by the end of this year, Oracle WebCenter Suite will be licensed as an option to Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition for $50,000 per CPU.

Oracle at the show also announced Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3, focusing on components and enhancements to enable enterprisewide intelligence. It also features integration with Oracle Applications, Fusion Middleware, and the Oracle Database, as well as expanded hot-pluggable support for third-party data sources and systems.