A Primer on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g

No matter what industry you’re in, middleware application infrastructure is a necessary piece of your technology investment, because it plays a vital role in the key processes and applications that run your business.  Middleware is often referred to as the “plumbing” of the infrastructure because it connects multiple applications together and allows them to communicate and pass data back and forth. 

A typical middleware suite includes Web servers, database engines, application servers, scripting languages, security, and some type of monitoring.  Some of the top middleware suite contenders include Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, IBM’s WebSphere, and Red Hat’s JBoss.  In my opinion, Oracle’s Fusion Middleware rises to the top.  Come on, how can you not have an appreciation for something that was incubated for almost 3 years and included nearly 13 million hours of testing?

The shiny new suite comes with many new bells and whistles and is fundamentally built on four major design principals (www.oracle.com):

1.    Complete – it’s a one-stop shop for all of your middleware needs

2.    Integrated – it plays nice with all of your other Oracle products, therefore simplifying integration complexity and reducing costs

3.    Hot Pluggable – it provides flexibility and allows you to leverage your existing technology investments with the ability to “drop and deploy” Fusion Middleware components into your existing environment

4.    Best of Breed – well my opinion could be a little bias here ☺

Fusion Middleware 11g introduces new and improved capabilities for the Oracle WebLogic Suite, the SOA Suite, and the Web Center Suite.  It also introduces us to Identity Management as a suite and emphasizes 11g’s improved functionality, integration and business intelligence. If you’re in the mood to totally geek it out on the technical details of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, you can certainly visit their site, but here’s a quick summary of the 11g enhancements:

•    Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g (together with WebLogic Server), the cornerstone of Fusion Middleware 11g, provides features such as GridLink for Real Application Clusters and ActiveCache which enables you to meet the varying demands of both users and systems

•    Oracle SOA Suite 11g is an integrated system that brings the business and IT together by providing a single process platform for human and document-centric business processes

•    Oracle Web Center Suite 11g lets you take advantage of existing IT components and allows you to quickly build enterprise portals, composite applications or personalized enterprise 2.0 Web sites.  It also provides you with the ability to manage the entire lifecycle from a single location  

•    Oracle Identity Management Suite 11g is a fully integrated security framework allowing developers to integrate security directly into their applications, termed by Oracle as “service oriented security”.  It also has built in enterprise analytics for compliance and governance and has introduced new features such as Universal Federation Framework

Other highlights of Fusion Middleware 11g include better content management with Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g, as well as enhanced development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper 11g. 

IT organizations will continue to strive for integrated solutions that will help them meet the demands of their business.  With the release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle has certainly set the standard for “ware it’s at”, in the world of middleware.