Oracle reveals BEA roadmap

Oracle presented on Tuesday a comprehensive roadmap for its recently acquired BEA Systems middleware technologies, making BEA's application server Oracle's strategic Java container and pledging continued support for BEA customers.

In a 105-minute Web conference, Oracle President Charles Phillips and, primarily, Oracle Fusion Middleware Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian covered product plans in the SOA, development tools, identity management and other middleware spaces. Oracle closed its $8.5 billion merger with BEA in late-April.

BEA customers will have investment protection, Phillips said. "There will be no forced product migration at all," he said.

Phillips cited SOA synergies and said Oracle, with BEA in tow, becomes number one in the middleware market.

"We want to provide a complete platform for developing [and] deploying SOA-based applications," Phillips said. The acquisition of BEA made sense because BEA is a pioneer in middleware and a company that "really got SOA," he said.

Oracle's plan categorizes BEA products into three areas: 

* Strategic products, which will be adopted immediately with limited re-design into the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform.
* Continue and converge products, which are BEA products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Fusion Middleware. These products will continue to be developed and maintained for at least nine years.
* Maintenance products, which BEA had put on an end-of-life status and will get continued maintenance for five years. One example is BEA's Beehive applications framework.

Perhaps the biggest -- but most expected -- revelation was in the application server arena. The BEA Weblogic Server Java application server "becomes Oracle's strategic J2EE container," Kurian said. It has been integrated with Oracle technologies like Oracle TopLink for Java persistence and Oracle Coherence grid capabilities.

Application server modernization plans call for modularization based on the OSGi standard. However, "Oracle's own application server continues development going forward," said Kurian.

SOA plans call for integrating the Oracle ESB (enterprise service bus) with BEA Aqualogic Service Bus. This provides a best-of-breed offering for customers, said Kurian. Also, the former BEA Aqualogic Enterprise Repository becomes Oracle's SOA governance repository; with it, SOA artifacts can captured shared and change-managed across the lifecycle, Kurian said.