Oracle-BEA middleware strategy announcement

01 Jul 2008 by Simon Haslam (in General)  |  Comments (2)

Today Oracle's President, Charles Philips, and Senior Vice-President of Product Development of FMW, Thomas Kurian, made a joint webcast about how Oracle was planning to integrate the products from the BEA acquisition. In cases where there is minimal functional overlap the BEA product will augment Oracle products, in some cases the Oracle product will become the strategic product and in others the BEA product will become strategic.

The webcast lasted for 1h 45mins so I will only summarise here what was immediately relevant to me, namely with a focus on Java web/call-centre custom apps - this means the development tools and application server, rather than for example, TP monitors or BI.

Thomas Kurian provided the technical detail. He was at pains to point out that the various midddleware products would continue to be supported for a long time but have been classified as follows:

• strategic
• continue and converge
• maintenance

"Continue and converge" are products that will continue to be developed currently but that will aim to be merged into strategic products (Mr Kurian mentioned "6-18 months" but I didn't really understand the exact meaning of that). Maintenance products are those that were already EOL prior to the BEA acquisition (like BEA Beehive).

Oracle's aims for FMW in a nutshell are:

• to be complete, integrated, modular, standards-based
• to support SOA & web app development, process management, BI, content management
  
• to lower TCO through better management of systems, services and user security
  

Now, for the key product areas:

Development Tools

JDeveloper will remain Oracle's primary development toolset, with ADF for declarative development (this is rather as people have been discussion recently on this OTN forum posting). However Oracle's Eclipse pack will also include former BEA Workshop functionality. Note that Oracle classifies BEA Workshop in the same "continue and converge" category as Forms, Reports and Designer so that gives a fair indication of what they mean. BEA Beehive is classified as "maintenance" (given that BEA had already adopted Spring as development framework then is was no surprise).

Application Server

This is where the bulk of the speculation has been of late. In short, Oracle's strategic FMW platform will be:

• JRockit JVM
  
• Coherence in-memory grids
• WebLogic Server JEE 5 container
  

A few points I noted:

Mr Kurian said that other JVMs, such as Sun's JDK on Sun Solaris, would be supported on non-IA 32/64-bit hardware. Whether this means that JRockit would be the only supported JVM for FMW on  IA-32/64 platforms (in particular RedHat or SuSE Linux) was unclear to me - if so I suspect it would cause quite a lot of stress in the shorter term due to the amount of re-testing required.

OC4J features will be incorporated into WLS, including SCA components and security providers. This is encouraging for me as much of app server admin revolves around tasks like setting up security.

Oracle says that OC4J will still be enhanced going forward and emphasised that E-Business Suite customers would not be forced to migrate to WLS. However it is very hard to imagine Oracle will allocate the significant amount of development resource required to, for example, support of new version of the JEE specification. Therefore I think we should assume that most enhancements will be related to stability, performance or management.

I was encouraged to hear that Oracle are supporting BEA's progress with re-architecting WLS to the OSGi modular java standards - having an app server that can be stripped down as appropriate has plenty of benefits for both ISVs and some more sophisticated corporate environments.

SOA

Oracle's SOA software today runs on a variety of J2EE applications servers - going forward it will continue to do so (e.g. including JBoss and IBM WS). I'll come back to the SOA product line-up another day.

Identity Management

It sounds as though BEA's AquaLogic Enterprise Security product will be re-branded and included in the OAM Suite. Again the overall IdM line-up is worthy of a separate write-up.

I'll skip the composite application building Enterprise 2.0 stuff too, suffice to say that the WLS Portal product is labelled as "converge" and all routes lead to WebCenter.

Timescales

Delivery dates is the area that is of most interest to many of us but unfortunately there wasn't a huge amount of detail about them in the webcast (fast forward to 1h 37 mins). Mr Kurian referred to 3 deliveries:

1) OAS 10g R3: a release of re-branded BEA products (presumably WLS) to fit in with the current FMW release labels

2) FMW 11g R1: this is claimed to be in "ramp down" phase and will include a "higher degree of feature function etc"

3) FMW 11g R2: "further integration and convergence between products"

Interestingly Oracle are going to extend support for 10g R2 and R3 for a further year.

I think the Oracle Java development community will be asking two big questions:

i) Is WLS and JRockit going to become the java container and JVM for the next release, i.e. 11g R1?

ii) When is 11g R1, along with JDeveloper/ADF, going to be released?

Of course the two answers are correlated: there have probably been versions of FMW 11g (if not perhaps ADF RC) based on OC4J almost production-ready for some time now; however if Oracle is trying to integrate OC4J features into WLS, and WLS into FMW (& JDev embedded), and run it all on JRockit then this could be a substantial amount of work. The other factor here is Fusion Applications - there must be an argument for getting the biggest upheavals out of the way before the first customer-installed shipments of Oracle's next generation of ERP software, which would mean getting them into 11g R1.

So overall Oracle has made some significant announcements today, but we still wait to hear important announcements about release composition and delivery timeframes.