Oracle details SOA, Java roadmap with BEA

BEA customers will not be forced to migrate to Oracle Corp. middleware products, Charles E. Phillips Jr., Oracle's president, said in a Webcast Tuesday to outline plans for the integration and support of the two companies product lines.

Oracle plans to converge the BEA WebLogic and AquaLogic product lines with its Fusion Middleware to provide a comprehensive set of products for service-oriented architecture (SOA), said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of development for Oracle middleware platform products. A new enterprise service bus (ESB) combining the technologies of Oracle and BEA is an early example of the synergy made possible by the acquisition, he said. The BEA WebLogic Application Server will also supplant OC4J as the company's flagship enterprise Java product, though some OC4J and Fusion features will be added to it.


We're introducing a converged product offering consisting of both Oracle's enterprise service bus and the BEA AquaLogic service bus.
Thomas Kurian
Senior VP of development, Oracle




The BEA products supporting SOA will continue to be upgraded for at least nine years and users will not be forced to migrate to Oracle products, the executives promised. Older BEA products that were already in maintenance prior to the acquisition will continue to be maintained for at least five years.

"We have not disbanded the BEA support organization," Kurian assured listeners in a more than 90-minute detailed explanation of the Oracle roadmap for the newly acquired BEA products. Beyond the support staff, he said Oracle planned to retain the BEA software engineering talent.

The Webcast appeared designed first of all to reassure both BEA and Oracle customers that the combined resources of the two companies would be beneficial, analysts who covered the event said.

Dana Gardner, principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions LLC., called the Oracle roadmap pragmatic and logical. Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst of application infrastructure at Current Analysis LLC., called it "a very mature approach to an acquisition."

Shimmin said the assurance from Phillips that there would be no forced migration was an important message, along with the grandfathering of the pricing and licensing for existing BEA customers, so they will not face sticker shock for their existing products.