Oracle Fusion 11g vows to tackle middleware complexity

Customers want easier integration of products across the suite

Oracle has promised businesses it is tackling the complexity of IT infrastructure, with the release of Fusion Middleware 11g.

Charles Phillips, president at the software supplier, told an audience of customers and the press in London that he recognised businesses face challenges with the sheer complexity of middleware architecture.

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"We're really trying to solve the complexity issue," he said. "And we want to change the way people think about computing. Most of our customers spend over 80 percent of their IT budget just on maintenance and running systems."

Oracle's middleware suite was "state of the art" for the needs of modern business applications, he claimed. It would help with agility, better operations, modern datacentres, and integrating a range of systems.

Fusion Middleware 11g had been long awaited by customers, but Phillips said Oracle made sure it developed a product that could serve what it saw a current business needs: including rich business applications, social computing, application customisation, system consolidation, business process management and identity management.

It would also place well on widespread new technology including multicore processors, 64-bit operating systems, and virtualised and cloud environments, he said.

Oracle also played to developers, claiming the product offered a "highly integrated development environment" in a "standardised framework". This framework helped businesses working towards a better service oriented architecture, it said.

Customers at the event spoke of their reactions to the new product release. Vocalink, a payment clearing and settlement house, said it hoped the new product would help with end-to-end visibility of network transactions.

Hussein Badakhchani, technologist at the company, said he hoped the product would deliver on a "tighter integration across the stack". It could help the company to maintain internal service level agreements across middleware technology, and help with automation of processes, he said.

Fusion Middleware 11g was developed through 7,350 person-years of engineering and 13 million hours of testing. Some 90,000 businesses already use earlier versions of the product.