New architecture and 'hot pluggable' middleware unveiled
at Oracle OpenWorld
Oracle has unveiled details of its Project Fusion strategy to
link together its enterprise applications with those acquired in
its takeover of PeopleSoft, Retek and the Siebel deal, which was
announced earlier this month.
The company has been on a multi-billion-pound buying spree with
the acquisition of PeopleSoft, Retek and the forthcoming Siebel
deal.
Addressing 36,000 delegates at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco
last week, Oracle president Charles Phillips said these
acquisitions meant Oracle would offer best of applications for ERP,
HR and with Siebel, CRM.
The company said it would make its product portfolio work
together seamlessly through the creation of Oracle Fusion
Architecture. This will be based on a service-oriented architecture
approach using open standards and a model-driven approach to
building composite applications.
Phillips said, "Oracle Fusion Architecture will be the reference
architecture on which we will build all our applications going
forward."
Fusion replaces the previous architecture, the Oracle
Information Architecture.
Oracle has formed a Fusion Strategy Council to elicit user
feedback on the architecture. One of the outcomes of this has been
a change in policy to provide a migration to Fusion for users of
PeopleSoft 8.8.
Oracle had originally planned to offer migration for users of
PeopleSoft 8.9, but found users who had recently moved to this
newer version were unhappy migrating again, said Phillips.
Along with the Fusion architecture, Oracle also unveiled an
improved version of the Oracle Fusion middleware platform, Oracle
Application Server 10g Release 3.
Phillips said Oracle had 26,000 users of its middleware
platform.
The new release is focused on the concept of "hot pluggable",
allowing users to employ alternative middleware components instead
of Oracle products.
Tod Nielsen, senior vice-president at Oracle, said, "The message
to customers is, don't get locked in. You should require your
middleware components to be modular and interoperable across
heterogeneous enterprise IT environments."
Due out next year, the new version will be certified to support
more than 128 products, including Microsoft .net, IBM WebSphere and
MQ Series, Cisco Local Director and Checkpoint firewalls.
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Oracle Fusion Architecture
- Oracle Grid Infrastructure
Oracle 10g
Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware in a grid configuration
monitored by Oracle Enterprise Manager. - Oracle Fusion Service Registry
Based on
Oracle E-Business Suite web services registry, this defines all the
Oracle applications web services, the integration interfaces for
third-party web services, and meta-data services that are specific
to each customer deployment. - Oracle Fusion Service Bus
The runtime environment for application services. - Business Process Orchestration
The tools to monitor and manage technology components at the
business process level. - Business Intelligence and Business Activity
Monitoring
Based on business intelligence delivered from Oracle Applications
and BI tools (ie Oracle Discoverer) as well as Oracle Fusion
Middleware BAM technology. - Unified Portal
Provides personalised
collaborative portals, based on Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g and
Oracle Portal.