Last month, VP Product Management of Oracle Integration David Shaffer, described the Oracle-BEA product strategy and SOA/BPM roadmap According to David, Oracle considers 3 main SOA market initiatives:
- SOA
- BPM
- Governance
Which are based on 3 supporting ones:
- ODI
- EDA
- Application Server Platform
Oracle SOA suit is aimed to provide services and events infrastructure and can be used as an integration and/or SOA platform. The foundation of SOA suite is Oracle Service bus (optionally WebLogic suite), complex events processing and business-to-business integration and Oracle Web Service manager. Additional components of SOA suite include Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Business Rules and Oracle Business Activity Monitoring.
According to David, the primary product integration and milestones look as follows:
- Today
- Best-of-breed portfolio
- Single point of contact
- Best practices
- 100-day release - Fall 2008
- Oracle branded
- Certified interoperability (BPEL, BAM, security, etc.)
- Native bindings to BPEL PM
- Common JCA adapter framework
- Certified on WLS 10.3
- Features such as REST, MTOM, Streaming
- 11g FY ‘09
- Platform consolidation
- JDeveloper tooling
- BAM monitoring extended to other components
- Enterprise Manager integration
- Integrated SOA Governance
- End-to-end security
- J2EE portability
The objective of the SOA ESB is to create a hot-pluggable environment, for mediation and internal integration, and use it for delivering new ESB features.
For the adapters used in the ESB, Oracle is planning to merge Oracle/BEA functional adapter’s offering, while ensuring that all of them are reengineered using JCA architecture. Longer-term plans include further rationalization around File, FTP, JMS, MQ adapters.
For the event processing strategy, the plan is to combine the existing BEA Events Server, designed specifically for high-throughput, low-latency event processing, and Oracle CEP, scheduled for release in 11gR1 release.
Oracle BPM suite is aimed to empower business users and can be used for business process design, modeling, implementation, monitoring and reengineering. The main components of the suite will include AquaLogic BPM Studio and Oracle BPEL Process Designer, Process Dashboards and Process Portal . In addition BPM suite shares Oracle BPEL Process Manager Oracle Business Rules and Oracle Business Activity Monitoring with SOA suite.
According to David, the primary product integration and milestones are:
- Today
- Best-of-breed portfolio
- Single point of contact
- Best practices
- 100-day release - Fall 2008
- Oracle branded
- Interoperability between BPM and BPEL PM
- Certified on WLS 10.3
- o Features such as enhanced BPMN support, enhanced Office integration
- 11g FY ‘09
- Platform consolidation
- o BPM Studio - unified modeling and simulation environment
- Native BPMN 2.0 support
- Process Portal - Collaborative workspace application built on Web Center
- Process Dashboards - Out of box process BAM dashboards
Oracle is positioning main business suite components as follows:
- BPM Studio: Integrated process, workflow, rules, and forms designer; includes simulation
- BPM Server: Integrated process engine supporting BPEL, XPDL/BPMN 2.0 and Human WF based on BPEL4People
- BPM Worklist: ADF Worklist application
- BPA Suite Addresses rich analysis and modeling requirements (e.g. Six Sigma, Lean, documentation-only modeling, etc)
Oracle SOA Governance suite is aimed to provide visibility and control to SOA users and can be used for the implementation of Business and IT Governance, as well assupport regulatory and compliance concerns.The main components of this suite are Service registry, service repository and Oracle management pack for SOA. In addition, Governance suite is sharing Oracle Web Service manager with SOA suite.
The components of governance suite allow enterprise to build end-to-end SOA governance. Enterprise Repository can be used to perform impact / dependency analysis on the existing services, compliance reporting, capturing of service reuse and service lifecycle management. SOA Management Pack supports management of production services, capturing of service usage metrics and services SLA monitoring. Web Services Manager supports run-time governance including policy-oriented security and access control.
Today, Governance suite is packaged as a "soft" bundle. Customers license as many CPUs as needed of:
- Oracle Enterprise Repository
- Oracle Service Registry
- EM SOA Management Pack
- Oracle Web Services Management (standalone or with SOA Suite)
This products strategy has full coverage in all aspects of SOA software. If properly executed, it could position Oracle’s offerings as the most comprehensive SOA software offering in the space
