Oracle Rewrites Its Middleware

It’s just an Oracle (ORCL) statement of direction out of the JaveOne conference, but it’s the right direction for investors. Oracle has announced plans to rewrite its middleware stack to eliminate the trifurcation among SOA, EDA, and (presumably) BPM functionality.

Today’s middleware is based on three disparate code sets from Iron Flare, Sandia Labs and Collaxa. This split is a drain on Oracle's R&D efforts and is confusing from a marketing perspective. In fact, it is almost as much of an issue as Oracle R&D and marketing folks having to deal with 10 or more application architectures: classic stored procedure Oracle, GEMMS, PeopleSoft, multiple flavors of J.D. Edwards, Retek, Siebel and so forth. Actually, the new software may be a two-fer.

The new middleware might lessen the application's development cost structure. However, it still cannot remove the costs of maintaining and servicing so many different applications. No availability date was specified in the press release, but if history holds, watch for some real substance at next year’s JavaOne conference. And stand by for competitor reaction.