ServersOracle Unveils Fusion Middleware 11g

Oracle Unveils Fusion Middleware 11g

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Oracle today unveiled the latest version of its Fusion Middleware, version 11g, a
major release in Oracle’s most profitable software line.

7,350 person-years of engineering nets “significant new capabilities.”

“It has significant new capabilities across all product lines,” said Hasan Rizvi,
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) senior vice president for Fusion Middleware products, in an online
press briefing with reporters ahead of the release.

It was a tremendous effort. It took 7,350 person-years of engineering, occupied over
3,500 Oracle developers, involved 220,000 tests run each night, and incorporated 5,420
customer enhancements and 1,987 individual development projects, according to Rizvi.

Within the Fusion product, the company delivered four upgraded product suites today.
The Oracle SOA Suite 11g helps companies build applications and the Oracle WebCenter
Suite 11g helps them deliver data over the Web, according to Rizvi.

He added that the WebLogic Suite 11g is used to run applications, including Java.

Rizvi claims the first phase of Oracle Identity Management 11g is the industry’s first
service-oriented approach to identity management and will help customers protect their IT
infrastructure from external and internal threats.

He added that Oracle will update other parts of the Fusion Middleware suite, such as
business intelligence and content management, to version 11g in the coming months.
JDeveloper 11g has already been released.

A strategy that centers on BEA

Oracle first talked about its integrated strategy and
11g
almost a year ago, when the company said it would be released in May of 2009.

Today, Rizvi said that goal has been achieved. “Nearly a year ago we announced a
product strategy around the BEA acquisition,” said Rizvi. “11g is the completion of BEA
integration.”

Rizvi added that because Oracle products are built on open standards, they are better
integrated than the competition, but that Oracle products can work with any assets.
“Middleware needs to work with whatever is in the IT environment, including other
databases, portals, and security infrastructure,” he said.

He noted that Fusion Middleware has 90,000 customers worldwide including 29 of the 30
Dow Jones Industrial Index companies and 98 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Rizvi said that 11g takes advantage of current software trends. It makes business
intelligence and analytics data available to more employees, within business parameters,
by incorporating BI into more commonly used applications.

It incorporates collaboration technologies such as blogging, wikis, and tagging to
deliver “end user empowerment.”

“Customers are asking that social networking applications be a first class citizen
within the enterprise environment,” Rizvi said. “They want to deploy collaboration that
will have the scalability, security, and availability to make it an enterprise class
critical service.”

Fusion Middleware 11g can use virtualization technologies to address up to 1 TB of RAM
in a grid of cached servers, and is built to fully utilize multi-core computers, Rizvi
added.

Better application development

One goal of the software suite is to enable enterprises to truly build company-wide
apps. To that end, the suite is designed to ensure that security is treated consistently
across all applications. “An SCA, a service component architecture, delivers a common
standards-based environment with common services like logging. This reduces the
development time for new applications and lowers the cost of application management,” he
said.

“There’s a big frustration among our customers at seeing security treated differently
on different projects,” Rizvi said. “In response, we give developers access to common
security solutions so that developers can build applications based on a common
service-based security model. With our beta program, we already have thousands of hours
of experience using this capability.”

“The suite integrates three types of business processes that organizations typically
deal with independently: humans, systems (IT), and document-centric processes. This
allows business users such as those in the HR department and the financial department to
use applications rather than requiring IT folks to program them, making department more
efficient,” he said.

He added that for developers, there is now little difference between portals,
communities, Web sites, and applications because all require the stringent development
standards reserved in the past for software.

Asked in the question and answer session whether the product would be Java-centric or
whether it would support other languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Javascript,
Rizvi said he’d rely on the open source community.

“We have various development tools,” he said. “We are developing for a certain class
of customer but our customers are also consuming different capabilities. We have the open
source Eclipse IDE ‘which is Java-based’ but we do have customers who are basically
living in other environments.

“Others in the market are developing support for those languages and customers are
free to use them.”

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com

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