As Published In July/August 2005

Come Together
By Jeff Spicer

Oracle consolidates and brands its middleware products.

Oracle recently announced that the company is branding its existing middleware products as Oracle Fusion Middleware. The new brand includes all Oracle Application Server 10g editions and related products, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Data Hubs. The move brings together more than 30 interrelated products and options to form a sophisticated offering for managing enterprise IT and business complexity and creating new services that can be deployed across a heterogeneous IT environment.

The branding effort makes sense on a naming level alone, in that it communicates the interoperability and relationship between Oracle's products. But, perhaps more importantly, the new branding serves to underscore Oracle's companywide initiative to deliver on its service-oriented architecture (SOA) vision. In the past several years, Oracle has invested heavily in middleware technologies for businesses, such as products for business process management, Web services management, identity management, and Java object-relational persistence.

That said, Oracle Fusion Middleware goes a step beyond offering just an integration platform, to offering a wide range of functionality for optimizing business and IT operations and productivity, providing historical and real-time decision support, and mitigating risk by helping keep information and applications secure.

Specifically, Oracle Fusion Middleware will include:

• The entire Oracle Application Server portfolio of products, which includes all editions of the application server and functional bundles such as Oracle Portal, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Integration, and Oracle Identity Management
• Oracle's complementary application server products and tools such as Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle TopLink, Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle RFID, and Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
• Oracle's Data Hub products, such as the Oracle Customer Data Hub and Oracle Product Data Hub
• Oracle Collaboration Suite and its content management, e-mail, calendar, and Web conferencing functionality

Next Steps READ more about Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle's PeopleSoft applications Oracle's JD Edwards applications Oracle's business integration solutions

By branding all of this functionality under the middleware umbrella, Oracle makes it clear that all of this functionality is intended to work together seamlessly to help bring order to the application complexity that plagues most enterprises. This is particularly important as many organizations are moving towards an SOA—which provides reduced costs and flexibility, but requires IT organizations to look beyond the traditional application-to-application integration model for core services such as process management, security, and providing users the information they need to make decisions.

Oracle Fusion Middleware also provides the standards-based infrastructure that Oracle is using for "Oracle Fusion"—the initiative to develop Information Age applications. A significant step toward delivering on Oracle Fusion, Oracle plans to certify PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware products later in 2005. This will provide PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers with an additional choice in selecting the middleware infrastructure to run and extend their applications.

In the coming issues of Oracle Magazine we'll profile businesses using Oracle's middleware products to streamline business operations, efficiently handle application integration, build smarter business intelligence systems, and look to ways to improve company collaboration. We'll also talk with PeopleSoft and JD Edwards users about their experiences with Oracle Fusion Middleware. But don't wait for our next issue to get educated about Oracle Fusion Middleware; you can learn more right now by visiting oracle.com/middleware.

Make Plans for Oracle OpenWorld Now

It's never too early to begin planning a trip to San Francisco, particularly if you're coming to attend Oracle's annual conference and trade show, Oracle OpenWorld. This year's conference will be bigger than ever—much bigger, with the influx of new PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Retek users. Oracle has planned hundreds of sessions for these users. The conference also features industry-specific sessions, keynotes from technology leaders, product certification opportunities, classes from Oracle University, user group events and meetings, and much more.

Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com