SOA Governance Key Focus in Oracle’s ‘Post-BEA’ Plans

Oracle Corp. execs this week outlined plans for Oracle Fusion Middleware, driven by integration of BEA Systems' technologies, partners and ISVs. On tap: SOA Governance suite; expanded BPM and data integration, and lifecycle tools to let IT and business users deploy, manage and update SOA services.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: Oracle, SOA Governance, BEA, Middleware, Technologies, Integration, Kurian,


Oracle Corp. execs this week outlined plans for Oracle Fusion Middleware, driven by integration of BEA Systems' technologies, partners and ISVs.

On tap: SOA Governance suite; expanded BPM and data integration, and lifecycle tools to let IT and business users deploy, manage and update SOA services.

Setting a Assuring Tone
From the start of the call, Oracle execs set a tone that tried to assure BEA customers that they -- and the BEA technologies they've been using -- are both highly valued at Oracle.

"BEA was a pioneer and leader in the middleware space, and got SOA," Oracle President Charles Phillips said during this week's web conference. Phillips also noted that many of BEA's core technologies would be integrated with current and future Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings.

Phillips also noted that BEA's core ecosystem of thousands of partners, developers, ISVs and customers would drive Oracle's middleware community conversation and direction, moving forward. He noted Oracle will bring its and BEA developer and architect programs together, to support more than 1 million enterprise architects, middleware designer and J2EE developers.

Into the Details: Oracle's Post-BEA Roadmap
Oracle Fusion Middleware Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian also credited BEA for its early position in favor if 'open' and standards-based infrastructure. Kurian said OFW will leverage BEA's technologies, patterns and communities to further create easy-to-design and easy-to-configure integration technologies for SOA-to-legacy and pure SOA.

"We [envision] not just a vendor middleware suite, but a modular, pluggable stack where each component is best of breed," Kurian said. In specific, he said, Oracle "will provide a complete and integrated middleware suite" tuned for SOA with a focus four (4) key principals:

  • Complete and integrated modular architecture. "We're not just talking pieces [of technology], but a modular architecture that lets users choose the pieces they want, all of which will be standard and open.
  • 'Hot-pluggable' components - to allow users to choose foundation components (application servers, database, etc.) they want from any vendor, not just Oracle.
  • Tools, Patterns and Products - to develop and deploy low-cost integration and configuration of data, business logic and business processes based on a services-driven SOA model.
  • Enable easy 'subscription' to foundation services to more cost-effectively apply end-to-end management, identity management, policy management and SLAs.

    SOA Governance Key Focus of Oracle's Post-BEA Roadmap
    Oracle will also leverage the BEA portfolio to launch an aggressive SOA Governance offering. To this point, Oracle has not truly offered a pure-play SOA Governance product to date. .

    Kurian called SOA Governance a "need to have" technology - for both Oracle and customers, and described Oracle's view of SOA Governance as key to address needs for management and visibility of assets across the SOA Lifecycle - from design time, to deployment and on-going operations and even in post-launch phases where SOA services and policies are updated or changed.

    Kurian said SOA Governance will require Oracle to present offerings for handling a wide number of assets - development, models, services and business processes. "Oracle will offer SOA Governance products that will help users "share[assets] in a repository, but also bind into the actual operations processes [customers] use."

    In development time, Oracle's SOA Governance offering will enable location and sharing of artifacts, let developer and business users make changes to processes during operations (without breaking current rules or workflows), monitor and manage workflows and policies, conducting pre-deployment testing and quality assertions, and ensure that string authentication and security policies are in effect for operations, as well as for those personnel making changes.

    Among the first steps, Kurian said: Oracle will combine BEA's AquaLogic Repository with Oracle's Policy Manager and Enterprise Manager, Kurian said. "Also, we have talks [underway] with HP about partnering with them for testing tools and quality…and load testing," he added.

    Other Highlights of Oracle's Middleware Roadmap
    Kurian also shared other Oracle "post-BEA" highlights:

  • Oracle will beef up its SOA tooling by adding BEA's Workshop design time components into JDeveloper. Oracle will also offer an Eclipse-centric extension for JDeveloper, the Oracle Eclipse Pack) that will bring BEA Workshop and Oracle's report writing tools outside of JDeveloper for those that want to develop middleware within the Eclipse environment.

  • BEA's JRocket and Liquid Virtual Machines will be offered to run on top of Oracle's hypervisor technologies for J2EE application servers to offer customers options to run middleware in a virtualized environment. Oracle will also support other JVMs, Kurian noted.

  • BEA WebLogic Server will become Oracle's 'strategic container' for Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. Kurian noted Web Logic is the 'market leader" in that space, and that Oracle will integrate key features from its own app server, including object relational mapping (ORM), a Java persistence reference implementation, and support for Service Component Architecture (SCA) runtimes and security.

  • Oracle will also upgrade BEA Tuxedo's support for high transaction-rate models, Oracle real app clusters and Oracle enterprise manger.

  • For ESBs, Oracle will converge ESB and the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. As to detailed, Kurian said, "BEA had elegant features, including capabilities for large, sophisticated transformations and a high-performance transport using XQuery

  • Oracle will converge Oracle and BEA support for complex event processing, where BEA Web Logic Event Server will offer a lightweight OSGI-compliant event collection engine and Oracle's CEP engine will support large number of mathematical for event processing. Monitoring will be available from both.

    • Oracle will begin a road show tour to discuss details of the Oracle-BEA integration plans in mid-July.


    back

    Share
    Go