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From the Editor
Big Crowds, Big News
By Jeff Spicer
Fusion Architecture tops list of announcements at Oracle conference.
The first clue that this would be the largest Oracle conference ever came on Saturday morning as I stood in the conference registration line—the registration area was already packed with people early on the first day of the conference, even as the Moscone conference center workers were still hanging the ubiquitous red, white, and black Oracle banners from rafters and street lights. More than 35,000 people traveled to San Francisco in mid-September for Oracle's annual conference, making it the largest event of its kind and in the process taking every available hotel room in San Francisco.
Big announcements from Oracle accompanied the big crowds, the most all-encompassing announcement being Oracle's evolving blueprint—called Oracle Fusion Architecture—for linking enterprise applications, middleware, and grid technologies. Oracle President Charles Phillips announced the architecture at his Monday-morning keynote presentation, and stressed the open standards approach to the architecture. Oracle Executive Vice President of Server Technologies Chuck Rozwat described the architecture as a fusion of grid computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Oracle's information architecture in which all integration points are based on accepted and well-defined industry standards.
Grid computing—the loose coupling of servers that can dynamically shift processing power to provide a highly available and performant computing environment—is the foundation of Oracle Fusion Architecture and was a major theme at the conference this year, as it has been for the past two years. But it was SOA that really garnered a lot of attention. SOA, the development of applications as modular, reusable services according to industry standards, is key to Oracle Fusion Architecture and forms the basis for Oracle Fusion, the effort underway at Oracle to integrate all of the company's enterprise applications lines.
Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President of Applications John Wookey provided details about Oracle Fusion during the week. As explained by the executives, Oracle is re-architecting its enterprise applications according to an SOA in which the applications will comprise components that can be organized by business processes and will communicate with one another based on accepted industry standards. Component-based applications are not a new idea by any means, as Phillips pointed out, but the "industry standard" piece is what makes this effort unique.
Phillips also discussed business process orchestration, or the organizing of these components according to a company's business processes. Like SOA itself, business process orchestration isn't a new idea, but in the context of a comprehensive SOA such as Oracle Fusion Architecture combined with Oracle's BPEL tool, business process orchestration will reach a new level of relevance and use in the enterprise, Phillips predicted.
Speaking of BPEL, one of the most entertaining sessions from the week was "Live from the BPEL Cookbook," in which Markus Zirn and Harish Gaur, both Oracle middleware product managers, presented a series of best practices for using Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Zirn and Gaur compiled a set of real-world uses for BPEL based on their interactions with customers. If you missed their session, not to worry; they'll be presenting the cookbook in serialized version on the Oracle Technology Network over the next few months.
Oracle Fusion Middleware—a platform comprising dozens of components for building and deploying component-based applications—was a hot topic during the week. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison stressed Oracle's commitment to industry standards and called these middleware components "hot-pluggable" because they conform to accepted industry standards and consequently can be replaced by competitors' components that are also standards-based.
There were many other notable announcements during the week, such as a new level of "sustained" support for Oracle products called Lifetime Support, and Oracle Senior Vice President for Oracle Application Server Thomas Kurian introduced Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 3, which includes support for Java 1.5, support for Web service interoperability across .NET and J2EE environments, and a new look and feel.
If you couldn't attend, you can catch the conference archived online, and be sure to read some of the blogs to get a flavor of the event.
Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com
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