Oracle today unveiled SOA Suite to help customers integrate legacy
and modern applications, cobbled together from homegrown software and
infrastructure products acquired through company purchases.
The service-oriented architecture suite for distributed computing is
designed to let customers blend new and old software so they don’t have to
“rip and replace” existing infrastructure.
Oracle said in a statement the suite should help enterprises meet their
customers’ requirements for speedy information retrieval and exchange and for conducting time-sensitive transactions.
Retrieving and exchanging information is crucial at a time when regulatory
compliance rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA call for information to be
saved unaltered and presented in its original form.
The suite includes a number of “engines” for Web services, BPEL processes,
business rules, management and message exchange.
For example, the Oracle BPEL Process Manager is a Business Process Execution
Language (BPEL)
design, define and execute business processes with Web services. This was
acquired in Oracle’s purchase
of Collaxa.
The Oracle Enterprise Service Bus connects existing IT systems and business
partners as services. And Oracle Business Activity Monitoring offers insight
into business operations in real time.
The package also includes Oracle JDeveloper 10g, an integrated development
environment for creating and composing applications.
Customers may buy the whole suite or mix and match individual products,
with licensing fees varying depending on installation size.
In what the company has come to call “hot-pluggable,” Oracle SOA Suite
provides a broad variety of Web services connectors to access legacy systems,
such as CICS, VSAM, and IMS, as well as packaged applications including SAP,
PeopleSoft, Oracle e-Business Suite and Siebel. Oracle also supports
competing application servers, including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and
JBoss.
SOA Suite is a cornerstone of Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Redwood Shores,
Calif., company’s strategy
for providing a quality distributed computing infrastructure for businesses
worldwide.
Oracle believes that offering all of the pieces in a condensed suite will
give it a leg up over rivals IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems, all of which are
vying for large chunks in the same multi-billion-dollar distributed
computing pie.
