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Oracle announced March 16 the availability of its Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, a platform for using physical and virtual Sun Microsystems environments. The announcement reflects what will surely be a period of Oracle focus on integrating Sun’s assets into the company’s portfolio, as that $7.4 billion acquisition heads toward completion.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center allows IT administrators to manage both physical and virtual infrastructure from a single point through every stage in the life cycle, from discovery and updating to management. The platform also allows for life-cycle management of Oracle Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and updating of Oracle Solaris through a proprietary software dependency engine. Systems can be placed into production faster through built-in knowledge of Oracle software and Sun systems, as well as active management of the service processor, virtual stack and operating environments, Oracle said.
In addition, the company introduced Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Connector for Ops Center, which allows a view into underlying Sun servers, Oracle Solaris and related virtualization.
“As the number of servers proliferates and the adoption of virtualization accelerates, organizations are becoming increasingly challenged with the complexity of managing their global IT infrastructure,” Richard Sarwal, Oracle’s senior vice president of Product Development, said in a statement. “With the addition of Ops Center to the Oracle Enterprise Manager product family, customers will be able to gain key insights into the capacity and health of their systems, enabling them to take proactive steps to increase flexibility and efficiency and decrease operational costs.”
The announcement of Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center follows the March 15 release of two Oracle Fusion Middleware components, Oracle Imaging and Process Management 11g and Oracle Forms Recognition. Those applications allow businesses to automate document- and image-centric processes such as claims processing.
Oracle has spent the latter part of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 working to integrate applications into its existing portfolios, in order to build complete stacks that can be offered to customers as end-to-end packages. “We have a deep interest in the systems business,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told an audience at the Churchill Club, in San Jose, Calif., in September 2009. “We’ve already beaten IBM in software. Now we want to beat them in systems.”
With Sun assets integrated into its technology base, Oracle seems poised to do just that, even though IBM has been making noise about making the fight a difficult one.