Oracle Talks Up App Server, Other Updates

Application Server 10g R2 (or 10g Release 2) is due later this month and will focus on better application integration capabilities and will add a BPEL process manager and business activity monitoring, according to Ron Wohl, executive vice president of application development at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.

Oracle is in the midst of moving its full lineup, including its Collaboration Suite, onto the 10g foundation. The Oracle 10g database was announced last year at this show.

"There will be extensive out of the box protocol support for a wide variety of protocols and will be easily extensible to support protocols we have not built in," Wohl told attendees late Monday.

Much of the news at the show is incremental. Oracle has been adding more monitoring and process support to its offering over time.

In addition, the data hubs Oracle executives have referred to for the last few weeks, will be available in the first half of 2005, Wohl said.

Oracle shipped its customer data hub last year and started talking about promised "citizen" and product data hubs a few weeks ago. The goal of the hub is to offer a single, true view, of up to date data for all applications to feed off.

On the roadmap for the first half of next year is a product data hub that promises to foster better part reuse, and synchronization and syndication of product data with trading partners.

The Citizen Data Hub is geared for public sector use, to help governmental organizations to better serve their constituents across agencies and services. A Financial Consolidation Hub is for companies that run multiple General Ledgers to offer reconciliation between subsidiaries. A Financial Services Accounting Hub targets banking and insurance customers who need to centralize financial operational data and accounting policies, Wohl said.

Earlier in the day, Oracle president Charles Phillips reiterated how pleased the company has been with its app server products. "We're number one in units, and in revenue we're in the top three with IBM and BEA," he told reporters at the show.