Oracle Upgrades SOA Offerings

Oracle opened its Oracle OpenWorld conference with a series of SOA-related announcements, including the availability of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3.

With service-oriented architecture as one of the themes of the event, Oracle opened the conference on Oct. 23 in San Francisco with the new component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The new version of Oracle SOA Suite 10g includes enhancements that simplify SOA deployment and installation, including a one-click install; an enhanced ESB (Enterprise Service Bus); expanded human workflow capabilities; enhanced Web services security and interoperability facilities; and new SOA governance support.

The product’s enhanced ESB can reduce the amount of programming required to connect heterogeneous services and applications in an SOA, the company said. Meanwhile, 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. This component also includes a new testing framework that automates process testing and service simulation for SOA applications.

In addition, Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3 includes facilities to identify, categorize, version and publish services to an Enterprise Service Registry; 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; out-of-the-box functionality to implement governance requirements for business process auditing; and metadata repository services to capture and track service interactions and store SOA artifacts and metadata for Web services, the company said.

Moreover, the new version features improved reuse of services and components, as well as an SOA design and implementation methodology, Oracle officials said.

SOA is high on SAP’s and IBM’s agendas. Click here to read more.

“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, Oracle’s vice president of server technologies, in a statement.

“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 for Hitachi Consulting, in a statement.

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