The Roadmap of Oracle's Fusion Middleware post BEA Acquisition

In the following presentation, Thomas Kurian outlined the road map of Oracle's Middleware Stack.

http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/bea.html (Para: "A World Class Combination")

http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/docs/oracle-middleware-strategy-briefing-072008.pdf

Here are some Comments on the delivery and upgrades from Mike Lehmann: Fusion Middleware 11 based around this WLS core infrastructure will be the upgrade path from Fusion Middleware 10gR3. The most we are allowed to generally say around time frames for FMW 11 R1 is CY2009.

Migration of Oracle's ESB from 10.1.3x to 11

With the announcement of Oracle SOA Suite AS11 aka Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW), many folks asked about the future of ESB 10.1.3.

ESB typically provides an infrastructure for standards based integration between systems supporting different protocols. At the heart of a ESB is a routing engine and a bus. On the edges it would have adapters supporting various protocols. Such framework supports policies like securities and provides a runtime visibility via a console. The FMW AS11 does exactly same and much modular way as.

FMW AS11 does all of these and more! And it is based on emerging Service Component Architecture(SCA). SCA provides a much missing standard for ESB to assemble components- services interacting together.

In Oracle Middleware version 10.1.3, ESB and BPEL are separate runtime. With FMW AS11, BPEL and Routing Service of ESB are service engines in a much modular architecture architecture based on SCA. Mediator is a new incarnation of ESB's routing service with a lot many new functionalities. Since the basic UI of the routing service is same as 10.1.3, those who are using ESB 10.1.3 you would be instantly be able to use it.

In addition to ESB 10.1.3 functionalities, you would be pleasantly surprised to see many new features that I could get added while re-architecting ESB on a new SCA based architecture.

Here are few of them:
1. Supporting Events natively: FMW now supports both Service and Event paradigms. Mediator is a rendezvous of both service and events.
2. Mediator supports more MEP patterns including dearly missing Async Request Response.
3. Mediator supports multi-part messaging and rpc/doc style
4. Mediator provides Schematron based custom validation framework
5. Mediator provides a rules based dynamic routing framework
6. Mediator provides a better fault handling and fault policies
and more such functionalities.

Though mediator's model has been changed, you can migrate 10.1.3 project easily in AS11 by opening them in JDeveloper.

Essentially, ESB in FMW AS11 would be Mediator + SCA based service Infrastructure + Events + Policy Framework + Adapters along with common infrastructure components like MDS(Meta Data service) etc.

Following picture (presented during OOW'2007) is the best way to represent ESB and SOA suite in AS11.

Oracle Honored with a Tech Innovator Award in the Business Enterprise

Oracle Honored with a Tech Innovator Award in the Business Enterprise Category by CMP Channel’s VARBusiness
Component of Oracle® Fusion Middleware Receives Industry Accolade

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 09-OCT-2007 05:05 AM Oracle today announced that it has received a CMP Channel VARBusiness 2007 Tech Innovator award in the Business Enterprise category for the Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The fifth annual Tech Innovators Awards celebrate the most innovative products, people and personalities in the industry and highlight emerging products and technologies currently sold through the IT Channel.


Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, standards-based set of middleware products used to easily build, deploy and manage Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The suite's hot-pluggable capabilities enable customers to take advantage of the many benefits SOAs provide, while leveraging their current middleware technologies and avoiding a costly rip and replace project. In addition, Oracle SOA Suite enables high levels of service quality with a unique Grid architecture for advanced scalability and performance using low-cost commodity hardware. Using the Suite, organizations can seamlessly connect, extend and evolve their existing IT systems to rapidly deliver new business services. Oracle SOA Suite is comprised of the best-in-class SOA components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and supports Oracle and non-Oracle application servers and messaging buses, including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss Application Servers.

Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During latest quarterly results)

Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During the recent Quarterly results of Oracle on Thursday 20th Sept 2007)

In Middleware, while Oracle is not number one like we are in Database, we are by far the fastest growing Middleware company. As Safra pointed out, our growth in software was the fastest it's been in a decade and that was really led by our Middleware group, whose growth was just spectacular. It looks like the Middleware business is coming down to the same big three players, but in exactly the opposite order.



With Microsoft’s middleware, a lot of it is embedded in Windows. Microsoft is the number one player. IBM is the number two player and Oracle is the number three player in middleware. But we have passed all the other niche players. We have really separated ourselves from the niche players. We're almost twice as large as BEA right now. BEA is shrinking in terms of new license sales.



So, it's come down to the same big three, but we're growing dramatically faster than our competitors and our target really is to beat IBM because it's very difficult to measure the size of Microsoft's middleware business because so much of it is embedded in Windows.



Also, as I said before, Microsoft is proprietary technology while IBM and Oracle both have a strategy to deliver middleware based on industry standards. According to our current growth rate, if we maintain our trajectory and IBM maintains their trajectory, we could pass IBM as early as the end of this year or certainly next year, to become the number two player in middleware. So that's very, very exciting.