Oracle today announced availability of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. This new version of the middleware suite offers increased functionality across its product portfolio, including new capabilities in Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Identity Management.
Other Fusion Middleware components focused on business intelligence, as well as content management will have their 11g releases later in the year, notes Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware Products, who provided a pre-briefing on the new products during a conference call yesterday.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g also builds on the previously announced Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g development tools including Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle TopLink.
Oracle's strategy for developing middleware is based on four main principles, states Rizvi. A key goal is to provide a complete suite of products so customers do not have to piece together different moving parts. Second, it is also an integrated suite of the products so customers don't have to do the integration on site; third, it is based on open standards and is hot pluggable. And finally, it provides best-of-breed capabilities, says Rizvi.
"Having an integrated suite is obviously very attractive but our customers don't want to compromise on the best-of-breed nature of individual components," Rizvi explains. "As our customers look to deploy these solutions they can pick the best technology available for their specific problem but then they have the added assurance that we have a more integrated, more complete suite of products that they can deploy over time."
According to Oracle, the latest release delivers capabilities that are intended to simplify the complexity of IT, while integrating modern application infrastructure requirements for development, SOA, cloud computing, business process transformation, service-oriented security, enhanced collaboration and IT governance.
Enhancements across the platform include Oracle SOA Suite 11g, which provides a single process platform unifying system, human and document-centric processes and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) with a complete range of SOA capabilities from development to security and governance. Oracle SOA Suite 11g, deployed on the Oracle application grid infrastructure, is optimized for building and integrating services on private and public clouds.
Additionally, as part of the new offering, Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g (which includes Oracle WebLogic Server) adds additional operational insight and automation to achieve greater application server uptime while reducing administrator costs. New features, including Oracle Fusion Middleware GridLink for Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Grid Messaging, aim to strengthen reliability and availability. Oracle Fusion Middleware ActiveCache also enables rapid scale-out to meet changing user demand and system load.
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of reusable, out-of-the-box Oracle WebCenter Services components that can be plugged into any type of portal-intranet, composite application, Web-based community-to enhance social networking and personal productivity. Oracle Composer, a declarative, browser-based tool, makes it easy for both end users and developers to create, share, and personalize applications, portals and social sites. The new Oracle WebCenter Spaces, a pre-built social networking solution, enables end-user driven, created and managed communities (group spaces and personal spaces) to increase productivity, communication, and efficiency.
And finally, Oracle Identity Management 11g delivers the first components of an integrated Identity Management suite and provides deeper integration with other Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions, as well as new features such as Deployment Accelerators, Universal Federation Framework, and a modern unified user interface based on Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces.