Fusion Middleware 11g Launch comes to London

For those who saw the webcast yesterday with Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian, you will have seen an impressive run through of the new middleware stack. You will also have seen how important this middleware technology is to Oracle's business both in its own right and as the foundation for Fusion Applications. It is a $1BN plus business in its own right and growing at an unprecented rate (rivalling the growth that was seen in the database business). Today the roadshow comes to London and I will be excited to see partners and customers reactions. I have been exposed to Fusion Middleware 11g for a while now - especially the SOA Suite elements and I have been impressed.

The release has been eagerly anticipated and it is great to see it ready for production release. The current 10g middleware stack has enabled us to deliver automated, agile and visible business processes for a large number of customers using components within SOA Suite and BPM Suite including BPEL, Rules, BPM, BAM and ESB.

The release of SOA Suite 11g is worthy of the term next generation – it greatly extends the current stack with key functionality, such as richer support for events, extended packaging and deployment options, a Java version of Business Activity Monitoring component, new user interface for Business Rules, better and more extensible Human Workflow, more use of ADF as the strategic framework for building user interfaces and a multitude of important enhancements to each individual component.

In addition to key new features, SOA11g is the first fully integrated enterprise SOA infrastructure available from Oracle (and on the market if you compare the necessary features for an enterprise class rollout of SOA), bringing together seamlessly the best components from the BEA and Oracle stacks. Choosing Weblogic Server as the foundation for 11g SOA will allow us and our customers to leverage the comprehensive J2EE, Spring, transaction and thread management, messaging and clustering support from a best in class Application Server.

The integration spans the whole stack above the Application Server; all components are now fully integrated. The new support for Service Component Architecture (SCA) is providing a standardised assembly and deployment model to simplify the design and management of all the moving parts. Another key component in bringing all the pieces together is Metadata Services (MDS) – this is something we will be hearing a lot about over the next few years as it is one of the key elements of the whole Fusion Middleware Architecture. MDS is a metadata repository underpinning all components across FMW 11g allowing all components to access and is what enables the rich drill-down and navigation capabilities between the components at design and runtime – it will simplify the management of the your solutions and ensure compatibility with future releases.

FMW 11g is a major release, it has been 3 years in the making with a huge investment in testing – from what I have seen in the technology previews and early access releases it looks well worth the time spent.

Visit the Oracle SOA landing page for more information on the 11g products