Oracle reveals its roadmap for BEA

BEA customers face a significant migration challenge after Oracle revealed its roadmap for the middleware and other technologies produced by the firm.

The database and software giant agreed a deal to acquire the middleware vendor for $8.5 billion (4.3 billion) in January this year, completing the deal in April.

However, it revealed that the only product likely to remain from BEA's core portfolio is also one of its most popular. Oracle pledged ongoing support for BEA's application server customers, becoming the strategic Java container for the vendor's own Fusion middleware suite.

Oracle president Charles Phillips was keen to reassure existing BEA customers: "There will be no forced product migration at all," he said late yesterday.

"We want to provide a complete platform for developing [and] deploying SOA-based applications. The acquisition made sense because BEA is a pioneer in middleware and a company that really got SOA [service oriented architecture]."

Oracle Fusion middleware senior vice president Thomas Kurian said that, in the BEA Weblogic Server Java application server becoming "Oracle's strategic J2EE container," Oracle had integrated its TopLink technology to deliver Java persistence as well as its Oracle Coherence grid capabilities.

But Kurian added: "Oracle's own application server continues development going forward."

Featured product integrations will include Oracle's enterprise service bus (ESB) with the BEA Aqualogic Service Bus, using the Aqualogic Enterprise Repository for its own SOA governance framework, while Oracle Service Registry will be retained for publishing and registering services. And BEA's Weblogic Event server will merge with Oracle's Complex Event Processor for event processing.

In the business process management (BPM) space, Oracle's Business Process Analysis designer will be integrated with the BEA Aqualogic BPM designer using a common BPM metadata model. But Oracle JDeveloper will remain as its toolset and its Application Development Framework will continue to be its model view controller framework. And the Oracle Data Integration product is retained, along with Oracle business process execution language (BPEL) Process Manager for SOA orchestration.

BEA Weblogic Integration will gain Oracle SOA technologies like adapters from BPEL Process Manager. And Kurian said BEA's Tuxedo transaction processing software would be strengthened to work beyond C, C++, and Cobol applications.

Kurian added that BEA's JRockit Java Virtual Machine and Liquid VM virtual machine, featuring hypervisor technology would be key technologies in the integrated product stack going forward.