Oracle's newest middleware technology platform takes advantage of virtualization and other next-generation technologies being integrated into the enterprise, and includes new developer tools for easier application build. Oracle President Charles Phillips suggested that the company's goal is to offer a pre-fabricated environment that allows IT administrators a substantial degree of control over their networks without needing to cobble together enterprise IT architecture by improvisation.
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.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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