Oracle AIA 3.1 Ships with First Wave of Pre-Built Process Integrations 
Oracle says that middleware isn’t always the best solution for some integration tasks. So, its latest upgrade to Oracle Application Integration Architecture ships bundled with pre-built packs for cross-industry, vertical and direct process integrations.
Oracle is shipping its latest upgrade to Oracle Application Integration Architecture with the first wave of pre-built integrations. Oracle AIA 3.1 includes nine cross-industry, eight vertical and two direct pre-built integrations. The AIA pre-built integrations, which also support entire business processes, are what Oracle calls Process Integration Packs (PIPs).
Oracle AIA is built on Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA and BPM technologies, and includes best practices the company has developed for a range of specific enterprise integration tasks.
Oracle AIA’s Foundation Pack looks to provide firms “a common framework and methodology” to simplify design, orchestration and delivery of agile user-centric business processes across Oracle and non-Oracle resources. Adding PIPs to Oracle AIA is an approach to boost productivity as well as improve service portfolio management and SOA governance, according to a top Oracle AIA.
“These pre-integration packs are specially designed to provide the right levels of granularity for a service,” Tim Hall, Oracle’s senior director of product management for Application Integration Architecture, told IDN. PIPs are based on well-defined design patterns and guidance Oracle has provided users over the past three years, he added.
“These are our first pre-built integrations that out-of-the-box will provide customers ways to achieve integration or get the building blocks they need to speed up those projects,” Hall said.
One Oracle AIA PIP aims directly to speed provisioning of design-to-deploy process projects. Oracle AIA’s Design-to-Release Integration Pack for Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process and Oracle Process Manufacturing enables seamless synchronization of enterprise product record and recipes across the supply chain and extended product network, according to the company.
Oracle Focusing on PIPS Because of
The Limits of Conventional Middleware
Why all the focus at Oracle on pre-built integrations?
Hall told IDN it’s mainly because middleware is not the best or most efficient choice for tackling any integration problem.
The AIA pre-integration packs are specially designed to provide the right levels of granularity for a service.
Tim Hall
Senior Director, Product Mgmt Application Integration Architecture
Oracle Corp.
“Middleware can’t do everything and is not the only solution for integration. In fact, there is no one single solution to integration, not an enterprise service bus, SOA, batch or even native integration,” Hall told IDN. “It’s when customers focus on middleware to solve all their [integration] problems that they can get into problems.”
With PIPs “Oracle is going to simplify and take a lot of costs out of many common and high-value integration problems that customers face,” Hall said. “PIPs will let customers use Oracle AIA to deploy end-to-end business activity integration, across departments and even partners.”
Hall shared an example of PIPs’ benefits. “They will know all the services involved with a process, such as order-to-cash, and will define how those services will be involved and work together,” he said. In addition to data and application integration support, PIPs also come with BPEL orchestration with WSDL definitions,
Among Oracle AIA 3.1 Pre-built Integrations (PIPs) are:
- Oracle Serialization and Tracking Integration Pack: Includes required business process models for mass-serialization projects. It combines product serialization and pedigree management capabilities of Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager with the Oracle E-Business Suite’s inventory, manufacturing and order management.
- Clinical Trial Payments Integration Pack (for Siebel Clinical): Includes what Oracle calls “the first building blocks” to automate the clinical trial payment process. Payment request information from Siebel Clinical is plugged into a SOA-based integration that can be utilized by any other system in the payment process. Once payment is made, details from any system can be inserted into the integration and received back into the Siebel Clinical system.
- Oracle Value Chain Planning Integration Base Pack: Extends the existing pre-built integration from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to Value Chain Planning and Demantra Demand Management solutions to include integration with PeopleSoft Enterprise Supply Chain Management to Demantra Demand Management.
Oracle AIA 3.1 “supplies an entirely new opportunity for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g to provide business and IT agility and lower the total cost of ownership,” Michael Weingartner, Oracle vice president of product development said in a statement.
Oracle AIA 3.1, with PIPs and Foundation Pack, is shipping now.
