Oracle Service Bus

From the podcast Oracle Middleware Strategy Update, I learned more about what Oracle will be doing with the BEA SOA products and how they will integrate or co-exist with the Oracle SOA Suite.

Interesting to hear that AquaLogic Services Bus (ALSB) will become the 2^nd ESB of the Oracle SOA Suite, called the Oracle Service Bus. This product is positioned as a "standalone" ESB, extremely fast, light-weight and highly functional, but tied to the BEA WebLogic application server.

Oracle will drop the BEA SmartConnect adapters and retain its own JCA adapters, with exceptions being e.g. the REST adapter from BEA. Oracle also goes for its own Web Services Manager for policy based security (based on security solution obtained from Oblix). Oracle will drop the BEA security solution and stop the relationship with Amberpoint. But Oracle will retain the BEA Event Server (Complex Event Processing) and BEA Repository (Flashline acquisition) as well as AquaLogic BPM (Fuego acquisition).

Interesting to learn that Oracle retains the BPM solution to complement their (strong) BPEL offering (Collaxa acquisition). Many integration vendors have 2 process management solutions: one more low level focusing on BPEL and integratino processes and one more high-level focusing on process modelling, human interaction (workflow) and business rules.

Oracle has made more podcasts available on other related BEA products. Nice to hear such clear statements from Oracle regarding the future of some of the BEA products.