Oracle's SOA Push

The database giant Oracle wants to give its customers one-stop shopping for SOA solutions. The open question remains whether its customers are ready.Certainly, our non-scientific surveys here at SOA Pipeline have suggested that many companies are in the early stages of SOA rollouts, and that the bulk are merely mulling the move. That said, Oracle operates in lofty circles, and rivals IBM, BEA, Microsoft, and others are all pushing their SOA product lines with a heavy hand. What Oracle is saying now is that its Oracle Fusion Middleware forms the bulk of its Oracle SOA Suite, which is now available. "Customers, partners, industry analysts and leading technology publications recognize Oracle Fusion Middleware's best-in-class technologies, support of industry standards and its unique "hot-pluggable" architecture," the company said in a release. "Today, customers and partners use Oracle Fusion Middleware's 'hot-pluggable' capabilities to deploy components of the suite on a range of popular operating systems and to interoperate with middleware technologies and business applications from software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP." Without going too far out on a limb, it's safe to say that the middleware push is a sound response to a marketplace where companies are going to be watching their IT budgets with a Scrooge-like gaze. Wringing the last nickel out of a company's legacy systems is an appropriate mantra at a time when many company's IT spending is likely to be flat with 2005 levels, if not lower. Oracle's Fusion Middleware brand includes Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Data Hubs and Oracle Collaboration Suite, now dubbed Fusion Middleware, and released earlier this month. Of course, Oracle has a built-in upsell opportunity. Companies who utilize the SOA suite with an Oracle application server pay $15,000 less per CPU than the $65,000 sticker price. Then there's the training costs for new systems, which EWeek highlights here.