Oracle plans to use this week`s Oracle Open World 2005 show in San Francisco to highlight its place in the middleware market.
Across several industry-specific briefings and opening day keynotes, Oracle emphasised it is a serious player in the middleware market.
"When we say middleware, we are referring to a product called Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 10g, which is the sixth major release the Oracle middleware suite," Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior VP told journalists at a media briefing.
Kurian described OFM as an integrated suite of tools and an integrated product suite that allows users to build applications, run them on an application server and connect them to different systems. OFM, he said, also enables business intelligence, enterprise portals, identity management and grid computing.
"We are the only vendor in the market offering a technically integrated suite of middleware, which has been a big driver for growth because CIOs want to reduce complexity," said Kurian.
There are three important characteristics of the OFM suite, according to Kurian: "It is comprehensive, 'hot-pluggable`, which means it is modular and can interoperate with existing environments, and OFM is unbreakable, displaying the same mission-critical capability for reliability, scalability and security we have on the database side."
Kurian identified the "hot-pluggable" aspect of OFM as being one of its biggest drivers, as many customers had some legacy middleware when Oracle entered the market. "Users do not have to 'rip and replace` existing middleware, but can adopt OFM incrementally," he explained.
"We already have 26 000 customers around the world and over 4 500 partners who run their applications on OFM. We believe we are well positioned to continue the strong growth we`ve already had and that is why it is such a significant and important business for Oracle," said Kurian.
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