SAN FRANCISCO — Continuing to build off its multibillion-dollar acquisition of BEA earlier this year, Oracle has updated yet more products by incorporating BEA technology.
The updates, unveiled here at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, are to Oracle WebCenter Suite — a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware — and WebLogic Portal 10g Release 3.
BEA’s technology is a key part of the Oracle WebLogic Suite, which is designed to drive Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) further into service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Oracle WebCenter Suite enables enterprises to deliver extranet and intranet portals together with composite applications, and to incorporate collaborative services — referred to as “Enterprise 2.0” — such as wikis, blogs, discussion forums, secure search and RSS feeds. The offering includes WebCenter Anywhere, which also enables users to connect with WebCenter Suite applications through multiple types of devices, including desktops and mobile devices.
Meanwhile, WebLogic Portal provides a massively scalable extranet and e-commerce platform to enable enterprises to target marketing efforts at users who revisit their e-commerce sites. This capability is based on stored data about previous visits and a dynamic user profile, which leverages content from data repositories.
BI and ERP on tap
BEA isn’t the only acquisition that Oracle continues mining for its current slate of products. At OpenWorld, Oracle also updated two additional groups of products: its Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (BI Suite EE Plus) and items in the Oracle JD Edwards family.
The new version 10.1.3.4 of Oracle BI Suite EE Plus is based on the analytics software acquired when Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) bought Siebel Systems for almost $6 billion in 2005. New features include integration with the recently announced Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system (EPM), a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware.
A tie-in with Oracle EPM enables users to access business intelligence data through a Web interface and integrate business intelligence content with Microsoft Office desktop applications, among other things.
BI Suite EE Plus also has been enhanced to include Oracle BI Publisher, an enterprise reporting solution to author, manage and deliver highly formatted documents. It also includes the Oracle Metadata Conversion Assistant, a migration utility.
Finally, Oracle also unveiled updates in its JD Edwards family of offerings, showing off new versions of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.98, the technology infrastructure for EnterpriseOne apps.
The new edition of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne includes a new project and government contract accounting module, and enhancements for financial, supply chain and human resource management.
Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.98, which is available for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne versions 8.10, 8.11 SP1, 8.12 and 9.0, ships in its latest incarnation with a new user interface and greater support for a number of industry standards.
