What's the Big O up to now in SOA?

In a previous post, I reported how some industry watchers (fairly or unfairly) regarded Oracle as a "Frankenstein" when it came to SOA.  The Big O was chided for building out their SOA offering by assembling various parts from various different acquired companies. And, Oracle has certainly been making more than its share of headlines with its recent acquisition binge.

Now, a recent report by Keith Rodgers in LooselyCoupled.com reveals the method to Oracle's Frankenstein madness.  

Oracle is now offering a platform of products called Oracle Web Services Management (OWSM), built on technologies from Oblix, which Oracle purchased last March. (Branding comment – OSOA, or Oracle SOA, would have had a cooler ring to it.)

Rodgers reports that Oracle is weaving OWSM "together with its identity management capabilities to form a combined component, designed to provide security and compliance capability for its Fusion middleware." Oracle's BPEL engine, now part of OWSM, comes out of technology purchased in the acquisition of Collaxa. The Fusion middleware stack also includes Oracle's Business Activity Monitoring technology and its ESB (formerly Oracle Interconnect). Systinet Registry (partner, not purchased by the Big O) will provide UDDI registry capabilities.

Some of this integration work will be seen in the next release of Oracle Fusion Middleware, scheduled for the first half of 2006, Rodgers writes.

Interestingly, as Oracle has no problem admitting, the Web services (and SOA) management market is one that has only begun to bud. Minoo Gupta, Oracle's director of development for Web services management, is quoted as saying that not many enterprises are seeking management capabilities. "Demand [for web services management] is growing, but we haven't seen thousands of Web services deployed where they need management of that caliber. It's more experimental than in deployment today."