Oracle Corp. Thursday announced a set of middleware aimed at helping enterprises build service-oriented architectures.
The new Oracle SOA Suite is designed to use Oracle software components or integrate with an enterprises existing non-Oracle middleware components.
The Oracle SOA Suite consists of components of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite, and it supports Oracles application server, as well as those from IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and JBoss Inc., the company said.
The suite consists of the Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a native BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) engine for Web services orchestration; the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus; the Oracle Web Services Manager; the Oracle Business Rules Engine; Oracle Business Activity Monitoring; Oracle Enterprise Manager; and Oracle JDeveloper 10g, an integrated development environment for creating and composing applications that also acts as a unified tool set for all components in the Oracle SOA Suite, the company said.
While the SOA space continues to shake out, Oracle is hedging its bets with a broad-based offering that supports a range of environments. However, at least one analyst said SOA customers are more likely to stay close to one or two primary vendors for SOA infrastructure technology.
“Companies dont want to have too many vendors in their portfolio and are financially motivated to keep things simple by selecting as few vendors as possible to work with, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Waltham, Mass. “And so, well have to see what wins the tug of war—greater vendor choice through interoperability and loose coupling, or reduced vendor selection for purposes of efficiency.”
Meanwhile, Oracle also launched a series of workshops introducing the Oracle SOA Suite to its independent software vendor and user community.