MIDDLEWARE

Announces Worldwide Availability of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3; Delivers Comprehensive SOA Infrastructure and Governance Capabilities: Building on its commitment to enable organizations to more easily develop, deploy, and manage Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Oracle announced the immediate availability of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3 and outlined its comprehensive governance capabilities and methodology. Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, offers significant enhancements that simplify critical aspects of SOA deployment and installation, including a one-click install; an enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB); expanded human workflow capabilities; enhanced Web Services Security and Interoperability facilities; and broad capabilities for SOA Governance, including an enhanced Web Services Registry and Web Services Manager. The high-performance, multi-protocol ESB can significantly reduce the amount of programming required to connect heterogeneous services and applications in an SOA. The Suite's orchestration component, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, delivers expanded human workflow capabilities that provide a simplified workflow designer and new algorithms for managing complex task routing and escalation. Oracle BPEL Process Manager also includes a new testing framework that automates process testing and service simulation for SOA applications, and a decision service that enables developers to easily integrate with business rules repositories from Oracle, ILog, and other Rules Engines from within the BPEL designer. "SOA is rapidly becoming the standard way for customers to derive added business value from their current IT investments and to integrate disparate applications and services," said Amlan Debnath, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. "Organizations looking to embark upon their first SOA implementation or those who are already down the path to an SOA can benefit greatly from the ease-of-use, robust features and hot-pluggable architecture of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3." "As adoption of SOA moves out of the early adopter stage and into the mainstream market, customers are asking for SOA infrastructure components that are easy to install, implement, and manage," said Brian Erickson, managing vice president of Strategic Technology Solutions, Hitachi Consulting. "Building on our long-standing relationship with Oracle, we are working together to deliver customers comprehensive best-in-class SOA capabilities and a reference architecture that can be used to more easily transition to an SOA." Delivering Improved Service Reuse and Quality with SOA Governance Governance is a key component of any SOA implementation. Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA Suite and Web Services Manager coupled with Oracle's policy- based governance methodology enable customers to define and implement governance policies and procedures. Organizations utilizing this approach can more rapidly overcome the development process challenges, organizational behavioral changes and implementation complexity typically associated with building an SOA. Additionally, with Oracle Fusion Middleware, customers can easily access appropriate, reusable services, speed assembly of composite applications and meet rapidly shifting business requirements. Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA Suite provides a single, integrated, browser-based console to administer policies across multiple, distributed enforcement points in both Oracle and non-Oracle middleware and heterogeneous enterprise applications. Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA Suite provides: -- Facilities to identify, categorize, version, and publish services to an Enterprise Service Registry and provide service change notifications to developers and applications; -- Facilities to securely view services within the Enterprise and to govern the provisioning of new services; -- Facilities to centralize the management of security polices and service-level agreements, including authentication, authorization and encryption policies; -- Facilities to centralize the management of service-level agreements for performance, guaranteed response time, and high availability and failover on services; -- Out-of-the-box functionality to implement common governance requirements for business process auditing and canonical data models; and -- Metadata repository services to capture and track service interactions and store SOA artifacts and metadata for Web services, service orchestrations and policies. Additionally, Oracle offers a proven SOA Design and Implementation Methodology that enables organizations to understand the business drivers that necessitate their use of an SOA; best-practice methodologies to design, implement, and manage an SOA; and a standardized process to measure the benefits and ROI from the use of an SOA to align business executives with the information technology organization. Oracle is conducting a series of global Oracle SOA events that will provide architects best practices and strategies on how to incorporate SOA into their organizations. For more information visit: its Web site.