Here are my notes from Oracle Middleware Strategy briefing.

The conference call started with energetic marketing spiel “Oracle is #1 middleware vendor”. The speaker was talking about exciting opportunities that Bea aquision presents to Oracle now that they have the biggest and the most complete set of offerings in the middleware market. At some point he even took some stabs at IBM almost saying that “Oracle middleware is bigger then IBM’s”. Ok, ok I got the message – bigger is better.

After that Thomas Kurian took over and gave outline on Oracle middleware product strategy and how Bea technologies fit into  Fusion portfolio. His presentation had very little marketing fluff and for the most part was right to the point.

Thomas divided existing Oracle products into three categories:

• strategic
• “continue and converge” (C&C) – Oracle will gradually merge this product into strategic Fusion portfolio with projected product lifecycle about 9 years
• maintenance – Oracle will support the product for up to 5 years but no major development is expected

Development Tools

• Oracle JDeveloper is a strategic product
• Bea Workshop components will be offered as add-on in Oracle Eclipse Pack
• Bea Beehive is a maintenance product

Application Server and SOA Products

• Weblogic Application Server re-branded as Oracle Weblogic Server will the strategic product. It will as include Oracle JRocket JVM. Oracle middleware products will be migrated to Weblogic runtime
• Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J) is C&C. Some OC4J components like Toplink will be included into Weblogic platform
• Bea Aqualogic ESB will the strategic product with some additional components from Oracle ESB
• Oracle BPEL is the strategic BPEL engine. A new product combining Oracle BPA and Aqualogic BPM will be offered as BPM solution

Enterprise 2.0 and Portals

A short lesson from Dr. Kurian on Web 2.0 and social software and back to business:

• Oracle WebCenter Services and Oracle WebCenter Suite is the strategic portal solution
• Aqualogic UI collaboration and social components will complement WebCenter framework
• Weblogic Portal and Oracle Portal are C&C product. However, the migration is not clear. Thomas indicated that current customers will be able to take advantage of some WebCenter capabilites.
• Oracle UCM was briefly mentioned as ECM offerening and “add-on” capability that WebCenter framework will leverage. Details on how Oracle UCM will fit into overall Fusion middleware picture were not provided
• Combination of WebCenter and Aqualogic UI components is targeted as a strategic solution in collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 space. The fate of other collaboration products such as Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Beehive or Oracle UCM Collaboration Manager is not clear at the moment as they were not mentioned at all