Building on the success of its market-leading application platform suite (APS), Oracle today announced the imminent availability of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2. The release boasts new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Grid Computing features along with major enhancements to the suite's Business Integration, Business Intelligence, Identity Management, Enterprise Portal, Mobile, RFID and J2EE components. Organizations are increasingly turning to Oracle's APS for best-of-breed middleware technology based on open standards. Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 provides organizations with industry-leading technologies for building and deploying enterprise applications based on SOA. These features enable customers to more easily integrate applications and data, implement more flexible and streamlined business processes and leverage existing information assets. Significant new features to improve developer productivity in building SOA and J2EE applications include a new release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g, broad support for SOA standards -- including WSIF, WS-Reliability, WS-Security -- and WS-Policy and support for Java ServerFaces. New features for enterprise integration include enhanced business process automation and monitoring capabilities with Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10g, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and business event management capabilities. Additionally, the release includes comprehensive business-to-business integration facilities with support for a broad range of industry protocols and standards such as RosettaNet, HL7, EDI, EDIFACT, AS2, UCCNet and SWIFT. Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 provides business-critical performance, scalability and high availability for enterprise grid computing. This software release includes a comprehensive suite of high availability features including automatic fault recovery, multi-tier failover notification, Application Server Flashback, Application Server Guard, Dynamic Workload Management, and enhanced clustering and backup and recovery. The expanded high availability and disaster recovery features will make it easier for organizations to deploy and manage enterprise grid infrastructures. Additionally, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g provides new features to improve manageability in grid environments including enhanced software provisioning, topology visualization and management, comprehensive SOA management, and enhanced application service-level monitoring and management. "Companies are looking to software providers to deliver comprehensive application platform suites while lowering overall information technology costs," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies, Oracle Corp. "This new release of Oracle Application Server 10g exceeds these requirements by delivering a complete application server platform with best of breed technologies that facilitate enterprise grid computing."