Oracle Launches Fusion Middleware 11g

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oracle announced the launch of its Fusion Middleware 11g in a presentation at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in downtown Washington, D.C., on July 1.

“This is a major launch of a key product line, a foundation for how we will deploy technology in general,” Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, said at the beginning of the presentation.

“We’ve been trying to build a single stack of technology,” Phillips continued. “Any complex system that is not architected or engineered to work together is going to be costly and error-prone.”

The better alternative, he suggested, is a pre-fabricated environment based on open standards, which can be patched and upgraded together with upgrades offered up and down the entire stack. Instead of requiring administrators to cobble together enterprise IT architecture by improvisation, Oracle intends to offer a pre-fabricated systems in its stead that will include, within its infrastructure, servers and storage built from Sun Microsystems components, and monitor and anticipate problems within the environment in real-time.

“We spend 90 percent of our time on maintenance because of a fragmented environment,” Phillips said. “With a complete stack, you can make architectural decisions that are logical.”

Oracle has been developing its middleware in an attempt to solve these IT administration needs, and Fusion Middleware 11g represents the next stage. The platform has been optimized for modern data centers – i.e., virtualization – and includes design to enable intelligent enterprises for real-time information; it also features infrastructure for agile business applications.

The middleware has been designed to solve developers’ needs for building rich Internet applications; allows for application customization and systems consolidation; and enables enterprise team and social computing. It creates a single place for controlling security aspects of the system.

The new middleware has been designed with an eye toward emerging enterprise IT.

“It takes advantage of multicore processors, with new levels of caches, such as L1 and L2 caches,” Phillips said. “We took advantage of 64-bit addressing…this will allow you to address larger spaces in data and memory.”

“We allow you to take snapshots of existing running configurations and make that a virtualized environment,” he added. “These are changes that are fairly current technology that you’re familiar with, and we’re going to enable it going forward.”

Developer tools integrated into Fusion Middleware 11g include common metadata management, application lifecycle management with a complete and open ALM, and a standards-based declarative framework, as well as 160 declarative components that can be dragged-and-dropped in the process of building applications.