Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 (OFM 11g R1) is an important step in the evolution of Oracle's application infrastructure strategy. This research will help CIOs, chief technology officers, enterprise technology architects and planners, application development and integration managers, project leaders and other IT practitioners. We discuss the technology advances and upgrade plans introduced in OFM 11g R1, and some initial recommendations for adoption.

• OFM 11g R1 is the outcome of a monumental effort to unify the wide array of Oracle's middleware technologies deriving from internal developments, and from BEA Systems and other acquisitions.
• OFM 11g R1 introduces notable new features and enhancements that pave the way for dramatic evolutions toward XTP, event-processing, modular "service-oriented architecture (SOA) inside" product architecture and others.
• OFM 11g R1 is the platform for the upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications, but we expect it will take six to 12 more months for the current generation of Oracle Applications Unlimited to leverage its innovative features.
• Most, but not all, OFM 11g R1 features are available. We expect the delivery to be completed by year-end 2009/early 2010; upgrade paths for some of the previous generations of technologies are still to be disclosed.

• Look at OFM 11g R1 as mainly a progressive and state-of-the-art stack of application infrastructure middleware, competitive with similar all-in-one suites. But not all its capabilities are currently available, and some product inconsistencies and issues remain.
• Consider OFM 11g R1 components as valuable best-of-breed products for many middleware segments, but keep in mind that some components are in their early life cycle stages.
• Look at OFM 11g as a major step forward if you use OFM, or former BEA Systems products now integrated into OFM; however, you should prudently and incrementally upgrade, considering Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

OFM 11 g R1 introduces an impressive array of new features, moves the suite to the next level of cohesion, introduces key architectural advances and carries out the bulk of the anticipated integration of BEA Systems' technologies into Oracle's application infrastructure middleware stack.

However, most users should not rush to adopt it. The delivery plan for OFM 11g R1 will require another six or more months to be completed, and it will take at least until well into 2010 for the full stack (and possibly even longer for some of the newer capabilities) to be fully proven in real-life production deployments. In any case, given OFM 11g R1's depth and breadth, users should plan for a phased approach to adopt what they need, when they need it.

On 1 July 2009, Oracle announced the first release of the version 11g of its Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM 11g R1) application infrastructure middleware stack. OFM 11g R1 combines BEA Systems and Oracle pre-BEA technologies, and introduces a wealth of new functionality. Most of the OFM 11g R1 components are available immediately (see Note 1); we expect the rest to be released through 2H09 or in early 2010. We expect Oracle to make it possible, within the next six to 12 months, to replace certain third-party (or previous Oracle) application infrastructure middleware components with equivalent OFM 11g R1 products in Oracle Applications Unlimited (e.g., PeopleSoft, Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Siebel, Retek and others). The upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications have been developed using OFM 11 g R1 tools and will be deployed on top of the OFM 11g R1 runtimes. Many OFM 11g R1 components will be bundled in the Oracle Fusion Applications packages, but others may have to be bought separately. OFM 11g R1 packaging and pricing haven't changed significantly from the previous version — OFM 10g R3.

The OFM 11g R1 announcement is the culmination of an impressive amount of engineering effort (more than 7,300 person years, according to Oracle) carried out since 2006 (OFM 11g was first previewed at Oracle OpenWorld in October 2006). OFM 11g R1 has long-term implications for Oracle’s strategy, but it also supports three key short-term objectives:

1. Establish a "complete, open, integrated and hot pluggable" (to use Oracle's words) stack to compete in the application infrastructure middleware markets against not only comparable best-of-brand application infrastructure stacks from IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi, but also best-of-suite or best-of-breed offerings from Progress Software, Red Hat, Software AG, Tibco and other smaller players.
2. Set up the enabling application infrastructure for the upcoming Oracle Fusion Applications, the next generation of Oracle's packaged applications.
3. Implement the Oracle/BEA Systems convergence road map announced in July 2008.

These objectives have, in large part, been reached, although some capabilities will be available only later (we expect in 2010). Despite an extensive testing through Oracle Fusion Applications, some of the OFM 11g R1 products haven't yet been proven extensively in real-life deployments.

A key theme in OFM 11g is the unification between the many components to give developers, IT operation professionals and end users an integrated and consistent experience. Key unification points include:

• The Oracle Application Grid is the OFM 11g conceptual foundation providing the high-performance and scalable runtime platform for most components of the stack. The Application Grid logically includes the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5-compliant application server, the Oracle JRockit JVM (Java Virtual Machine), the Oracle Coherence distributed caching platform, and other components for virtualization support and management.
• The Services Infrastructure is a set of technologies that provides a service component architecture (SCA)-based interoperability infrastructure enabling service- and event-based interaction across the components of the suite, and incorporating policy enforcement agents. The Services Infrastructure is not a product, but a set of common capabilities embedded in many OFM 11g R1 components, including: Oracle BPEL Process Manager (PM), Oracle Business Rules, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Oracle WebCenter and Oracle B2B Integration. Oracle plans to enable this infrastructure through other products, like the Oracle Service Bus.
• Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) provides a metadata-based integration of OFM components in terms of application development and personalization. MDS is not a product, but a set of capabilities shared by a large number of OFM products, including: Oracle BPEL PM, Oracle B2B Integration, Oracle Web Services Manager, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle WebCenter Framework/Services/Spaces and Oracle Universal Content Management. MDS application programming interfaces (APIs) are fully documented and can be leveraged by users and third parties.
• Oracle JDeveloper is the JavaServer Faces (JSF)- and Service Data Objects (SDO)-enabled integrated development and composition environment supported by the metadata-driven and MDS-enabled Application Development Framework (ADF) and by a wealth of modeling tools.
• Oracle WebCenter Framework 11g provides the unified environment for users to interact with OFM-based applications through a variety of channels, including Ajax, Microsoft Office and mobile devices.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the unified management environment via the Oracle Fusion Middleware Control set of capabilities.
• Oracle Enterprise Repository, in combination with Oracle Service Registry (OEM from HP Systinet technology), Oracle Web Services Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the foundation for life cycle management and governance through a federation with MDS and other metadata repositories across the stack.

OFM 11g introduces several evolutions of the internal architecture of the stack that will have a long-term impact on the middleware strategy of Oracle and of its partners and clients.

Leveraging BEA Systems' work and its own research, Oracle has introduced support for the OSGi standards to componentize WLS according to an "SOA inside" architecture, but more OSGi exploitation throughout the stack is likely to take place. Through reuse of OSGi componentry, Oracle primarily hopes to improve time to market of new middleware products and to reduce OFM development and maintenance costs. An example is the Oracle CEP (complex event processing) product, which shares many core components with WLS.

We expect that some of the dynamic modularity benefits of OSGi will be transferred to clients in the forms of optimized, reduced footprint deployment options (this is already, in part, available for WLS) and zero-downtime patching and upgrades, as well as the potential ability to mix-and-match plug-in functional modules from multiple providers. However, a full OSGi enablement of the OFM stack would be a massive undertaking that would take several years to complete. Oracle will likely adopt a gradual and selective approach, focusing initially on isolating those functionalities of greater potential internal reuse. Therefore, the anticipated benefits of OSGi for users will not be available throughout the stack within the next three years, although some products possibly will enable some of the previously mentioned reduced footprint and patching/upgrade capabilities.

OFM 11g R1 extensively enables the metadata-based definition of several application artifacts (user interaction, task flows, portlets, business rules, message transformation and routing rules, process definitions, composite application models, BAM reports, CEP rules, etc.) that can be created, manipulated, stored and retrieved via MDS. Each tool adopts the most appropriate metadata format: Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), BPEL, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), XML Schema Definition (XSD), Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSLT), XQuery, security policies or others. However, MDS makes it possible for the sharing of these metadata between the JDeveloper-tooling and the various runtime executives (and across multiple runtimes). SCA, is the uber-metadata format, aimed at aggregating (through the Oracle JDeveloper SCA Composite Editor tool) the many metadata artifacts (deployment descriptors, process definitions, Web pages, etc.) that make up a modern SOA application into a single, manageable entity.

The OFM metadata architecture also enables incremental customization and personalization of applications, by which a set of metadata-based artifacts can be customized for a certain implementation and then further personalized by individual users through the WebCenter Composer end-user-oriented tool. These metadata-based personalized artifacts are separated from the application code; therefore, they don't need to be redeveloped when the application is upgraded to a new release (as long as the underlying application data models with which these artifacts deal remain unchanged). According to Oracle, the OFM metadata architecture (including MDS) has been extensively used in the development of Oracle Fusion Applications. These incremental customization and personalization capabilities are among the major benefits that Oracle hopes to transfer to users of the new packaged applications suite.

However, some components of OFM (e.g., BAM, Identity Management [IdM], business intelligence and data integration) are currently not MDS-enabled. Oracle has stated its intention for MDS-enabling the whole OFM stack, but it hasn't disclosed yet when this will happen. We expect Oracle to announce integration in the OFM metadata architecture for some other products during the next six months, while OFM 11 R1 rollout is completed.

Oracle plans to continue investments in metadata technology. The results will likely take the form of an increasingly comprehensive programming model (rather than the stovepiped models of today) as OFM evolves during the next five years. Such a commitment is key for the future of OFM (and of Oracle Fusion Applications), because it paves the way for improvements in developers' productivity, management and operations and, potentially, to support cloud-style multitenancy.

OFM 11g has confirmed the strategic role of the Oracle Coherence distributed caching technology, which is rapidly becoming a pervasive enabler across the stack. Oracle Coherence is plug-and-play integrated with WLS for session state management, with Oracle TopLink (via the standard Java Persistence API) for enhanced object/relational mapping scalability, with the WebLogic Portal for Web pages caching, with the Oracle Service Bus (a derivative of the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus) for service result caching, and with Oracle CEP.

Within the next 12 months, we expect Oracle Coherence to be integrated with several more OFM components, including the Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle WebCenter Framework. In this way, Oracle aims to enable users to dramatically enhance performance and scalability of these products with minimal disruption for established applications. Although some products (e.g., Oracle BAM) are still based on specific caching architectures, Oracle Coherence will play an increasingly critical role in Oracle's strategy and — together with OSGi, Spring, and metadata technologies (SCA, BPMN and others) — will constitute the foundation for future significant evolutions of OFM in support of massive scale-out, elastic and cloud-capable, XTP platforms.

However, Oracle Coherence is a sophisticated technology that requires availability of deep architectural and technical skills to be deployed effectively to deliver the anticipated scalability, performance and availability benefits.

OFM 11g R1 introduces a wealth of new capabilities in most of the products of the suite (on top of the new features deriving from the integration of BEA Systems technologies). Among the most significant are:

1. JRockit JVM optimizations for multicore processors
2. WLS scalability, availability and performance improvements
3. Enhanced integration between WLS and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
4. Support for multiterabyte data grids in Oracle Coherence
5. End-to-end tracking of composite applications execution
6. Oracle Service Bus improvements for Java objects routing, service result caching and cross-referencing
7. Improvements in Oracle Business Rules and in the Oracle B2B Integration products
8. Better integration of Oracle BAM with the rest of the stack — Java Message Service (JMS), Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle Enterprise Manager
9. New appliance builder tool to create — from existing software configurations — software images (from the operating systems to the application) that can be deployed at one time on virtualized environments
10. A new unified BPM platform (based on the well-established Oracle BPEL PM technology) supporting human-centric, system-centric and document-centric workflows in an integrated fashion
11. Enhancements to the recently released complex event processing engine (Oracle CEP), which has been extended with improved tooling and tighter integration with Oracle Coherence and Oracle JRockit for performance improvements
12. Oracle WebCenter Framework integration with the metadata repository (MDS) to enable a centralized and common metadata infrastructure
13. Oracle WebCenter Framework support for JSF, which permits the development of portal and nonportal Web applications from a common infrastructure
14. New Oracle WebCenter Spaces capability — offers a single architecture supporting team collaboration environments ("Group Spaces"), role-based personalization and individual MyPortals ("Personal Spaces")
15. New Oracle WebCenter Composer — a new composition capability targeted at the growing interest in enterprise mashups
16. New entitlement manager and declarative security framework
17. New identity warehouse and analytics capabilities
18. Automated assist tools to support upgrades of Oracle Application Server (Java EE), BPEL PM, B2B Integration and BAM applications from OFM 10g R3 to OFM 11g R1

Although most of the new capabilities are available, some (e.g., BPMN support for BPM, new content management features, and identity warehouse and analytics) are planned for release later (we expect toward the end of 2009 or early 2010).

Although many of these new capabilities (e.g., one through eight on the list above) are incremental extensions of well-established products, a good deal of them (e.g., nine through 18 on the list above) are new or recently released products (although some of them, such as Oracle CEP and the entitlement manager, are based on BEA technologies) scarcely proven in production deployments, despite the extensive OFM 11g R1 beta program carried out during the past six to nine months.

OFM 11g R1 implements many steps of the BEA-Oracle technology convergence road map illustrated in July 2008. For example:

• WLS has replaced Oracle Application Server as the core Java EE runtime for other OFM components.
• BEA AquaLogic Service Bus (now Oracle Service Bus [OSB]) has replaced Oracle ESB as the strategic SOA integration technology and has absorbed some of its features.
• Oracle CEP has been integrated on top of the WLS-derived, OSGi-enabled underpinnings of the former BEA WebLogic Event Server.
• Some functional elements of BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (renamed Oracle WebCenter Interaction) and other Web 2.0 technologies of BEA origin (AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Ensemble) have been integrated into Oracle WebCenter Services.
• Oracle JDeveloper is the development environment for all the OFM 11g R1 components, including those of BEA origin, such as WLS and OSB.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager is the monitoring and management environment for all the OFM 11g R1 components, including those of BEA origin.

But some more work is needed to complete the BEA integration plan. In some areas, the upgrade path from previous generation products to OFM 11g R1 has not yet been disclosed. For example, at the time of the convergence road map announcement, Oracle suggested that:

• The midterm evolutionary path for BEA AquaLogic BPM applications would be toward the new unified BPM platform.
• WebLogic Integration users should consider migrating their applications to Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle Service Bus.
• The midterm evolutionary path for WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic User Interaction would be toward Oracle WebCenter Framework and Oracle WebCenter Services.

To support those migrations, Oracle promised specific tools, which are not yet available nor announced. This may not be an immediate problem for most users of the to-be-migrated products, given that support is ensured for a congruous number of years. However, those wishing to quickly adopt OFM 11g R1 will have to carry out expensive manual upgrades of their applications based on the old, to-be-converged products.

One of the stated goals of OFM 11g R1 is to be "hot pluggable," with that meaning the ability of supporting multivendor, heterogeneous environments. This strategy has two aspects:

• Interoperability — the ability for OFM-based applications to interoperate with non-Oracle packaged applications/software-as-a-service offerings or with applications built on top of non-Oracle environments, such as Microsoft .NET, IBM CICS and IMS, Java EE platforms from other vendors or application-platform-as-a-service offerings or in multienterprise B2B scenarios.
• Portability — the ability to replace some components of OFM with compatible products from other vendors.

The first aspect, interoperability, is fully addressed by OFM 11g R1, which supports the same range of application and technology adapters, connectors to non-Oracle database management systems and interoperability protocols, including B2B and electronic data interchange, supported by OFM 10g R.3 plus additional capabilities provided by the now-integrated BEA AquaLogic Service Bus technology.

For portability, we believe that Oracle is taking a more relaxed approach in some areas. The possibility of using third-party JMS providers instead of Oracle's; and the support for Eclipse, in addition to JDeveloper, for development has been confirmed in OFM 11g R1. One of the key characteristics of previous versions of the stack was the ability to deploy some key components on top of Java EE servers alternative to Oracle Application Server. Currently, OFM 11g R1 components requiring a Java EE runtime can only be deployed on WLS.

Postannouncement, Oracle published a "statement of direction" declaring the commitment of certifying several products (Oracle BPEL PM, Oracle Web Services Manager, Oracle Business Rules, Oracle BAM, Oracle B2B, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Manager and others) on IBM's WebSphere Application Server and Red Hat's JBoss Application server in the first half of 2010.

This means that OFM 11g R1 components will be available on alternative Java EE servers nine to 12 months after the initial release. Even though Oracle claims this road map was defined on the basis of customers' recommendations, it is a clear reflection of Oracle's confidence in the strong positioning in the Java EE market it has gained through the acquisition of BEA Systems. Portability on competing Java EE servers was a way for Oracle to enter a market dominated by competitors like BEA Systems, IBM and Red Hat.

We believe that Oracle's priority has moved to expanding its ecosystem of partners and ensure interoperable coexistence with competing ecosystems, so the focus of "hot pluggability" will continue to shift toward interoperability and give portability lower priority.

For users looking for best-of-brand or best-of-suite application infrastructure:

• Take OFM 11g into consideration as one of the most comprehensive and better integrated application infrastructure suites in the market. However, keep in mind that not all its capabilities are available and that, despite an extensive beta program and testing in the context of Oracle Fusion Applications, some product inconsistencies and malfunctioning may still be possible, given the notable set of new features introduced. Moreover, due to the OFM depth and breadth, plan for a phased adoption approach.

For users looking for best-of-breed application infrastructure middleware:

• Evaluate OFM 11g components as competitive products in their respective segments, for the most part. The stack includes not only proven and well-established products (e.g., WLS, OSB, BPEL PM, Coherence), but also technologies (e.g., CEP, WebCenter Framework/Services/Spaces, Enterprise Repository) in the early stages of their life cycles and with a limited installed base.

For OFM users (including clients of former BEA Systems' products now integrated into OFM 11g R1):

• OFM 11g is a major step forward from a functional and architectural perspective; however plan for an upgrade to the new version in an incremental and prudent way, given that some of the OFM 11g products have not been fully proven in real-life production deployments, and in anticipation of possible further changes that could result from Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems.