Oracle Heralds SOA 2.0 with New Fusion Middleware

Published: June 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Chances are, you've heard of service oriented architectures (SOA), the new development technique/marketing buzzword that is sweeping the IT nation. But have you heard of SOA 2.0? Even before most shops can figure out what a SOA is and get it implemented before all the excitement abates, Oracle is making sure they'll have something more to upgrade to: a new member of its Fusion middleware strategy called Event-Driven Architecture, or EDA.

According to Oracle, the new EDA product is a key component of SOA 2.0, "the next-generation of SOA that defines how events and services are linked together to deliver a truly flexible and responsive IT infrastructure." (If you thought that's what SOA 1.0 was supposed to deliver, we've got some ocean-front property in Arizona to sell you.)

Oracle says the EDA suite enables companies to react more quickly to changing business conditions by helping them build, deploy, and manage event-driven applications, without the complex and expensive software engineering you might think such flexibility entails. "The underpinning of this new responsive IT infrastructure, SOA 2.0, results in enterprise flexibility and IT modularity, as well as rapid pattern detection and response," says Amlan Debnath, vice president of Fusion middleware at Oracle.

The EDA suite is comprised of various Oracle technologies, including a designer that helps define and correlate events; an iteration of the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for collecting and distributing events; a copy of Oracle Business Rules to define the business policies needed to execute on certain events; a version of Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM!) for monitoring and analyzing business events occurring across your systems; and the Sensor Edge Server for connecting radio frequency identification (RFID) and other technologies into the mix, the company says.

Other products that work with the EDA Suite includes Oracle's Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, all J2EE application servers, the JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4 standards, and all messaging buses, including Sonic Software's SonicMQ, TIBCO Software's Enterprise Message Service, and IBM's WebSphereMQ.