Fusion: Oracle's "Websphere" and more

Oracle has a lot of middleware products, now they will all have a common brand name, just as IBM has its Websphere brand.   

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a newly created brand for Oracle's family of middleware products, which includes Oracle Application Server, Oracle Developer Suite, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager, among others. Fusion provides a standards-based approach for deploying SOAs. Using Web services, an Enterprise Service Bus and Oracle BPEL Process Manager to implement SOAs, customers can integrate applications and automate business processes.

At a press conference at an Oracle customer event (covered here by SearchOracle.com), Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, discusses his plans to move Oracle Application Server suite to a componentized application stack powered by Web services and Oracle's newly created Fusion middleware.  And in the process, take on Oracle's ERP competitors in this space, particularly SAP.

In other words, Oracle's products will all be evolved to Web services components. Fusion will support "everything that's in the Application Server, plus the customer data hubs, and the Oracle Collaboration Suite. Anything that is not an application for the grid database is included."  The evolution to standardized Web services components will be "incremental," he says. "It will be one component at a time and one process at a time, not only done by business but by looking at what is the natural business flow for these particular processes."