There is a lot of buzz in the commercial sector about the use of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to integrate heterogeneous applications quickly and easily. At Oracle, we believe that this new technology offers many benefits to the public sector too, and especially to ISVs developing public sector applications.

In brief, a SOA enables applications to call up processes and functionality from other applications inside and outside the IT infrastructure, enabling disparate applications to work together to present the user with a seamless business process. A SOA enables end users to create and modify business processes from multiple applications as needed, without having to hand-code each process each time a new one is required.

Service-oriented architectures are well suited to government and public sector organisations because these sectors rely on an array of niche applications to manage specific activities - such as housing, social services, planning, etc. - in addition to horizontal suites of ERP software. In Oracle's experience, government organisations are typically running around 100 different applications and frequently need to bring multiple applications into the same business process.

This means that ISVs whose solutions can integrate readily with other applications in the customer's infrastructure enjoy a distinct advantage when responding to RFPs. Oracle is enabling hundreds of ISVs with public sector solutions to achieve this advantage, with its state-of-the-art Oracle Fusion Middleware platform.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a comprehensive applications integration, development and deployment platform that lets ISVs develop applications that are based on open standards - an increasingly essential requirement for government IT systems - and geared for interoperability. Using the business process modelling tools in Oracle Fusion Middleware, ISVs, integrators and end-customers can quickly and easily create and modify business processes involving multiple applications - and these processes can be modified further by business users without any technical knowledge.

Dublin-based Daon is just one ISV that is using Oracle Fusion Middleware to create a service-oriented architecture for government-specific identity management applications. Click here to read more.

To read more about how you can use Oracle Fusion Middleware to create open-standards based applications that will integrate readily with other applications in your end-customers' IT infrastructure, visit our SOA webpages.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about working with Oracle or becoming an Oracle partner, please don't hesitate to contact your local Oracle PartnerNetwork Interaction Center.

I look forward very much to working with you.

Jens Mortensen
Vice President, Public Services, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa