Oracle released new middleware software today to accommodate its PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers.
The No. 2 business software vendor said its Oracle Fusion Middleware is a suite of products based on its current line of middleware products with a few modifications. The goal, according to Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing at Oracle, is to let customers connect or “fuse” their Oracle and non-Oracle business applications together.
“We are responding to requests by PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers that said they need a second option when it came to integrating middleware with the rest of their IT,” Schultz told internetnews.com.
The rebranded package shares the name but differs greatly from Oracle’s Project Fusion, which is the company’s promise to support current PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products while they work on a next-generation merged product.
“Fusion Middleware is for mature products and is not being used across any other product lines,” Schultz said.
The Fusion software line includes those found in Oracle Application Server 10g such as the Application Development Tools and J2EE Application Server; Web Services infrastructure; Enterprise Service Buses and Integration; Business Process Management and Activity Monitoring; Business Intelligence Tools; Security and Identity management; Enterprise Portals and Mobile. The new suite also includes security products from Oracle’s recent acquisition of Oblix as well as its Oracle Data Hubs and Collaboration technology.
The middleware products are then used to help crate Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) using Web services, an Enterprise Services Bus and Oracle BPEL
One part of the new Fusion Middleware lets customers build business processes for several different applications using APIs
Individually, Oracle and PeopleSoft launched hosted services repositories in 2004 complete with libraries of these points. Now in 2005, Oracle said it is combining the local repositories to let customers connect application services with Oracle BPEL Process Manager for business process orchestration across multiple product lines.
The second phase of Fusion is for Oracle to certify PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware products, the company said.
Schultz said that by the end of the second quarter, Oracle will have certified its People Process Manager product (based on the BPEL open standard) and certified its own LDAP directory for PeopleSoft products. By year’s end, Oracle is expected to certify with other J2EE servers, its Oracle Portal server, its Identity Management server and the Oracle Integration server.
The roadmap for JD Edwards customers will cover the same certification points as the PeopleSoft ones but the process is being delayed by three months. That means the first phase of JD Edwards will see its first growth spurt to happen in the third quarter of this year and wrap up by the first quarter of 2006.
In addition to being certified for use with Oracle’s Java Application
Server, Oracle said PeopleSoft and JD Edwards apps would also be mixed
into Oracle Portal. The process lets customers tap into Oracle
E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications from a single
Enterprise Portal. PeopleSoft and JD Edwards Applications will also be
integrated with Oracle Identity Management, Oracle said.
