Oracle Corporation announced availability of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, the next generation of the vendors' leading middleware product suite designed for service oriented architecture-based environments. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is an application infrastructure that now includes the WebLogic application server, originally offered by BEA Systems before the company was acquired by Oracle in 2008. The suite also includes a number of integrated and hot-pluggable components, including new capabilities in Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Identity Management.
Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware Products, says that the new suite includes more than 5,500 enhancements. Oracle Fusion Middleware is designed to address four requirements, he explained at a press conference. "The first was providing a complete suite of products. We believe our customers need a more complete solution from Oracle instead of trying to piece together a lot of moving parts," he says.
"The second principal is that it's an integrated suite of products," he continues. "Third, [Oracle Fusion Middleware] is based on open standards and is hot pluggable. And by hot pluggable we mean it supports the heterogeneous enterprise. Middleware needs to work with whatever is in the IT environment. Obviously there are a lot of Oracle products in the IT environment, but there are a lot of other products that our middleware works with. Other databases, other application servers, other portals and security infrastructures."
The fourth and final requirement is that all Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings are best-of-breed capabilities, Rizvi says. "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. As our customers look to deploy these solutions, they can pick the best technology available for their specific problem."
Enhancements across the platform include Oracle SOA Suite 11g, designed to provide a single-process platform that integrates system, human and document-centric processes and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) with a 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, the vendor says.
Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g (which includes Oracle WebLogic Server) adds new levels of operational insight and automation to help improve application server uptime while reducing administrator costs. New features include Oracle Fusion Middleware GridLink for Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Grid Messaging, 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 is designed to provide reusable, out-of-the-box Oracle WebCenter Services components that can be plugged into most types of portals-intranet, composite application, web-based community - to enhance social networking and personal productivity. Oracle Composer, a declarative, browser-based tool, is intended to enable both end-users and developers to create, share, and personalize applications, portals and social sites. The new Oracle WebCenter Spaces is a pre-built social networking solution for end-user driven, created and managed communities (Group Spaces and Personal Spaces).
Oracle Identity Management 11g delivers the first components of an integrated Identity Management suite and features 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.
Rizvi says that Oracle Fusion Middleware is the fastest-growing product set at Oracle, and that 90,000 global customers now use the suite.
For more details, go here.