Oracle to release 10g application server

Oracle Corp. on Wednesday plans to announce the availability of a major upgrade to its application server, called Application Server 10g, which includes features that let companies take the plunge with grid computing.

The software also includes new features for integrating business applications, managing business processes and for business activity monitoring, which lets customers track the performance of specific applications. The release includes almost 600 new features altogether, according to Robert Shimp, vice president of technology marketing at Oracle.

“We’ve had the Application Server 10g in beta for nine months, dozens of customers have been testing it and many are going into production right away,” Shimp said.

The product is to be followed later this month by 10g versions of Oracle’s database software and of Enterprise Manager, which includes new features for managing grid environments. In January Oracle plans to release JDeveloper 10g, a new version of its application development environment. A preview of that product is also scheduled to be made available Wednesday.

Taken together, the 10g products support the emerging grid computing model, which is supposed to help customers cut costs by making it easier for them to lash together groups of industry-standard servers for running their databases and applications. New features in the 10g application server make it easier for customers to clone and manage large numbers of application servers, Shimp said.

“We’ve made a lot of enhancements to provision, manage, clone and deploy large numbers of application servers easily,” he said.

Pricing and packaging for Application Server 10g is similar for previous versions. A Java Edition aimed at developers is priced at $5,000 per CPU (central processing unit), a Standard Edition including portal and business intelligence functions is $10,000 per CPU, and the full Enterprise Edition is $20,000 per CPU. The Enterprise Edition includes wireless features that used to be sold separately, Shimp said.

Initial versions of the product are for Unix and Linux; a Windows version will follow shortly after.