Integration in Focus

Oracle Vice President Jose Lazares on Oracle Application Integration Architecture

Oracle's commitment to providing multiple paths to the future for its applications lines has many aspects. The company has been careful to provide incremental methods of moving forward that allow customers the freedom to drive their migration plans based on their own business needs, rather than arbitrary deadlines set by Oracle. One of the key strategies is Oracle Application Integration Architecture, which uses a combination of industry-leading middleware and best-in-class applications to provide business processes that bridge traditional operational silos quickly and cost-effectively.

"Oracle has bought many best-of-breed and industry-specific applications, and now we need to make them work together," says Jose Lazares, Oracle vice president for application strategy and development. "This is what Oracle Application Integration Architecture is intended to do." The core concept is to enable customers to get value from a myriad of application assets by creating business processes that span multiple applications, from Oracle as well as third-party software providers. These business processes will enable Oracle's best-of-breed applications to behave as a suite so customers can use them as such. "It's our hope that Oracle Application Integration Architecture helps answer the question many customers are asking: 'How is Oracle going to bring together its broad and ever-growing portfolio of applications?'" says Lazares. The architecture is aimed at easing pain points for CIOs on a number of levels:

• Easing the cost and resource bottleneck of integration efforts. At the core of Oracle Application Integration Architecture are the Process Integration Packs, which allow CIOs to integrate applications with standards-based prebuilt technology packages and without spending time and money on custom solutions that need to be upgraded with each application change.
• Providing prebuilt service-based modules and thus an evolutionary pathway to service-oriented architecture (SOA). "Forrester says that last year, 14 percent of respondents said they would move to SOA but only 2 percent did," says Michael Seymour, director of product strategy at Oracle. "Oracle Application Integration Architecture provides not only the technology components for SOA, but also applications that run on this technology and a governance and methodology to control and maximize the value of the deployment. This gives customers a prebuilt SOA, enabling companies to jumpstart SOA initiatives."
• Allowing companies the freedom of choice. Using open standards and Oracle Fusion Middleware to build Oracle Application Integration Architecture is an important differentiator. Not only will Oracle Applications be seamlessly connected to provide additional incremental value to existing investments, but because Oracle Application Integration Architecture is based on open standards, partners and customers can easily integrate custom and third-party applications. This makes it possible for customers to leverage best-of-breed applications that will now work together as a suite.
• An alternative migration strategy to Fusion. Oracle Application Integration Architecture's common object architecture is also used by Oracle Fusion applications. "Oracle Application Integration Architecture uses a common translation vocabulary that will be supported natively in Oracle Fusion, so it supports an evolutionary path for customers," says Lazares. "Adopting this looser abstraction between systems means that CIOs can plug in Oracle Fusion modules and evolve to it over time."