Oracle announced Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware that combines business-process administration with collaboration tools such as wikis, on June 14. At its core the application relies on a "unified process engine," as well as tools for end-to-end management; Oracle is also highlighting the platform's "user-centric" design, with tools tailor-fitted to the requirements of its users and administrators. Oracle's steady drumbeat of 2010 releases seems designed to extend the company's reach into the enterprise's end-to-end processes.
Oracle is announcing Oracle Business Process Management
Suite 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware that combines
business-process administration and collaboration tools onto a single platform.
The company touts the offering's combination of middleware platform and social
networking as an industry first, although its rivals have been engaged in
integrating a "social" aspect into business software for some time.
"Today, critical business processes span disparate systems
across the enterprise, making it difficult to model, monitor or manage them,"
David Shaffer, vice president of product management for Oracle Fusion
Middleware, wrote in a July 14 statement. "Built on a unified process foundation,
Oracle business Process Management Suite 11g enables organizations to engage
both businesses and IT users more easily in the management of core business
processes and simplify the complete business process lifecycle. Now, businesses
can innovate more easily and improve the processes that are critical to their
organizations."
Business Process Management 11g includes a "unified process
engine" for executing BPEL and BPMN processes, as well as human workflow and
rules, and allows for end-to-end management of business processes. It also
features BPM Studio, for role-based modeling and design, as well as a Process
Composter for Web-based process modeling and deployment, as well as
capabilities for process analysis and reporting.
Oracle executives have highlighted the platform's
"user-centric" design, with tools tailor-fitted to the requirements of its
users and administrators; in addition, its social components allow users to
collaborate through wikis and blogs, establish customized "team spaces," and dynamically
add and delegate to new team participants.
Oracle has maintained a steady drumbeat of new releases
throughout 2010, part of the company's larger plan to become the largest and
most mission-critical IT systems vendor in the world. On June 8,
Oracle
announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g,
also a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which combines a number of the
company's backend offerings, including process and records management, into a
complete system. The platform is designed to be a scalable solution for image,
Web, document and records administration.
That followed on the heels of the company's April 22 rollout
of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, a platform for consolidating various systems
management and support tools with an integrated interface. Enterprise Manager
11g includes increased support for the management of Fusion Middleware 11g,
with provision for large-scale SOA Suite and WebLogic Server environments, as
well as Database 11g Release 2. It leverages Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition
of Sun Microsystems, by allowing an IT administrator to manage the life cycle
of physical and virtual Sun environments and Solaris containers.
"We've already beaten IBM in software ... Now we want to beat
them in systems," Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison told an audience during
a September 2009 appearance at the Churchill Club in San Jose, Calif. "We have
a deep interest in the systems business. Great systems vendors ship a
hardware-software combination that allows them to be instrumental in the
acceleration of the Internet."
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