Last week, at work we had a number of sales people from Oracle to do a presentation, since I lamented somewhat about Oracle, I was curious to find out from them what exactly are going to be included from the BEA product suite into the Oracle suite. I was told politely to wait for the 1st of July announcement. I didn’t register for the webcast, but I did manage to squeeze in the 2 pod casts on the road with Thomas Kurian. Here are some take-aways for me, and I hope you will find this somewhat useful:

  • Weblogic JRockit is here to stay, and existing Oracle products can now running on top of this very efficient JVM and the nowly aptly named Oracle Weblogic Application Server. Some features from existing Oracle App server will be incoporated.

Thumbs up for me on that one, you get no arguments from me here. JRockit is a proven solution, and a crown jewel from BEA. I am not too familiar with the Oracle App Server, maybe others can add their 2 cents here.

  • Aqualogic Service Repository will be incorporated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Well, you need a service repository to hold all your artifacts for your service as well as providing governance, and the means to publish such details to it, so the point is sorta moot here.

  • Oracle WebCentre Suite (formerly Aqualogic User Interaction) will bring out a whole host of enterprise 2.0 capabilities that are going to be based on the Weblogic Portal servers.

This is very similar to what IBM just announced with its plans on the WebSphere Portal v6.1. I am interested to know what you think about this portal approach. Is it because many of the clients have already bought into portals so it is a way to recap the investment into existing infrastructure?

  • Tuxedo is incorporated into as a key offering from Oracle as a transaction processing solution, making it available on more OS platforms, tigher integrations with Oracle database etc etc.

There are no surprises there, given that Tux has been used by a lot of enterprises for mission critical transactions.

  • Enterprise Service buses from both AL and Oracle will interoperate and comply to the Service Component Architecture. The Weblogic Event server lives on in the BPM suite, everything else seems to come from the existing Oracle products.

I think AL has been following the SCA path for some time now, may be there are just some re-jig from the Oracle’s fence. That’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed my rant, and your comments are always welcome as always :-)

~paul