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Oracle Corp. announced Tuesday that it has certified its PeopleSoft Enterprise applications to run on Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g Release 2, a move that will provide more integration capabilities for Enterprise users—and streamline the upgrade path to Oracles next-generation application suite, Project Fusion.
Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and its Enterprise suite (and J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne suite) of applications in January.
The Fusion Middleware certification brings Enterprise users into the Oracle fold by providing the ability for PeopleSoft applications to run on Oracles Containers for Java. At the same time, the applications can now be built out using the Oracle JDeveloper and Application Development Framework and accessed on the Oracle Portal using JSR-168 and WSRP Portlets standards.
PeopleSoft applications are already certified on IBM and BEA application servers.
“Were not removing any choice, just adding [choice],” said Jose Lazares, senior director of product strategy at Oracle, in Redwood Shores, Calif. “Right now, customers are given a run-time license as part of their PeopleSoft purchase, and they can run either [application server] at no additional charge. Existing customers on any PeopleTools upgrade … can make an upgrade to Oracle middleware tools at no additional cost.”
The second part of the Enterprise applications middleware certification is around bringing specific tool functionality in the Fusion stack—its BPEL (Business Process Execution language) engine, BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) capabilities and Discoverer tools—to the PeopleSoft environment.
Oracle has created extensions from the Enterprise environment to its BPEL engine and certified five separate design patterns that provide the ability to send and receive a number of different message types between the two environments.
“Were allowing for these two to interoperate and subscribe to each others notifications,” said Lazares. “If BPEL gets generated, it can publish in its own environment, but if a worker is in their own PeopleSoft work environment … they can now publish to that environment.”
The idea is that by using Oracles BPEL Manager (along with its Enterprise Service Bus messaging platform, an add-on to the Fusion Middleware stack) business services exposed from PeopleSoft applications can be orchestrated into both composite applications and existing business processes, according to Lazares.
Using the BAM capabilities in Fusion Middleware, the processes can then be monitored; using Discoverer, they can also be analyzed.
On the PeopleSoft side, Oracle is exposing current Web services with the capability to version those services to allow for integration between any SOA (service-oriented architecture)-compliant stack.
“We will do the work first with Oracle Fusion Middleware to allow for bidirectional introspection to be able to look into and pull services into a common middle tier,” said Lazares.
Secondly, Oracle is looking to enable a more robust integration from a human task perspective by aligning the two environments for more seamless process flows.
The certification is also geared toward ISVs, enabling them to run PeopleSofts Enterprise applications on Oracles J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) 1.4-compliant application server.
The Oracle Fusion Middleware stack includes Oracle Application Server 10g, with optional modules like Identity Management, Business Intelligence, BPEL Process Manager, Web Services Manager and BAM, along with a host of other integration-related capabilities.
Oracle recently certified PeopleSofts J.D. Edwards applications on Fusion Middleware and plans to extend that certification to its own E-Business Suite in the near future.