Oracle packages middleware as SOA suite

January 16, 2006—Providing one-stop shopping for service-oriented architecture deployments, Oracle is packaging together several of its existing Fusion middleware products as the Oracle SOA Suite.

Products will be integrated and have a common install and management tools. The suite is a unique approach to addressing SOA deployments, said Rick Schultz, vice president of Fusion Middleware at Oracle.

“People have piece parts, but nobody’s really put together a comprehensive SOA suite and certainly not one that’s hot-pluggable and works with other vendors’ middleware products,” Schultz said. Using the suite with Oracle’s application server, however, will be less expensive than using it on a rival application server: The price is 0,000 per CPU when deployed with an Oracle app server or 5,000 per CPU when used with a rival product.

Components of the suite include Oracle BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) Process Manager, for mapping out business process flows; Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, for connecting existing IT systems and business partners as a set of services; Oracle Web Services Manager, providing a console for setting Web services policies; and Oracle Business Rules Engine, for defining and managing business rules.

Other middleware products in the suite include Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, for insight into business operations; Oracle Enterprise Manager, for managing SOAs; and Oracle JDeveloper 10g, an application development environment for Java applications.

Although Oracle and competitors are gunning to create a complete SOA package, “It’s not clear that customers are looking for a one-stop shop for SOA,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.