Oracle in Leaders Quadrant of Gartners Magic Quadrants of Infrastructure Market

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant for Four New Application Infrastructure Magic Quadrants
Thursday June 28, 1:00 pm ET

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., June 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Meeting the middleware needs of more than 35,000 customers, Oracle today announced that Oracle® Fusion Middleware was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of four new Gartner Magic Quadrants tracking the Application Infrastructure Market. The Magic Quadrants cover: Application Infrastructure; Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects; Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects; and Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects.

In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, Gartner states, "Gartner has defined a new market for application infrastructure that reflects the convergence and overlap of many of the products available to support application development, deployment and execution." Moreover, "Application Infrastructure includes the majority of runtime middleware, as well as application development and management tools that support the new generation of application styles based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture and business process management (BPM) technology."(1)

"Oracle Fusion Middleware is a highly-integrated and comprehensive family of products and as a result, it is increasingly serving as the foundation for organizations' service-oriented integrations," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Senior Vice President, Server Technologies. "We believe that Oracle's position in the Leaders Quadrant for Gartner's four Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure demonstrates Oracle Fusion Middleware's ability to provide best-in-class capabilities for a wide range of integration projects while delivering tangible benefits."

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Application Infrastructure

Gartner states, "Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, 2Q07, analyzes the total application infrastructure market and the relevance of suppliers whose products might be used in a variety of project types." Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, Oracle delivers a comprehensive standards-based portfolio of middleware software that spans enterprise application servers, business integration, business process management, identity management and SOA offerings as well as developer tools.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects

Gartner states that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application (SOBA) Projects "evaluates vendors against the relevant subset of all technology attributes of application infrastructure: modeling and design of SOA-style applications and engineering and management of new user-facing software as well as back-end application components (service implementations and interfaces) and flows."(2) Located in the Leaders Quadrant of this Magic Quadrant, Oracle delivers with Oracle Fusion Middleware a best-in-class Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, SOA Suite, metadata repository and business process management capabilities that make it easier for organizations to create SOAs.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Composite-Application Projects

According to Gartner, "Although composite applications are not new, they have gained increased prominence owing to service-oriented architecture (SOA), so a requirement for comprehensive, end-to-end application infrastructure for supporting their implementation is emerging from the user community."(3) Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Composite-Application Projects, Oracle provides organizations comprehensive business process management, SOA, integration and development tools that support heterogeneous environments.

Oracle Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Back-End Application Integration Projects

In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects Gartner states, "More germane to the back-end application integration market is that Enterprise service buses (ESBs) provide low-cost, easy-to-use alternatives to integration suites in projects that require interfaces with simple and medium complexity."(4) Located in the Leaders Quadrant for this report, the hot-pluggable architecture of Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA Suite and ESB, coupled with its expansive portfolio of adapters, enable organizations to more easily integrate their heterogeneous back-end applications.

The Application Infrastructure and related Magic Quadrant reports can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/index.html#fus.

About Oracle Fusion Middleware

The company's comprehensive, standards-based family of middleware products, Oracle Fusion Middleware enables customers to adopt and manage service-oriented architectures in heterogeneous computing environments. More than 35,000 customers now use Oracle Fusion Middleware and include leading organizations in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Health Care and Public Sector industries. Oracle Fusion Middleware is also supported by 9,000 partners, including marketing leading independent software vendors, value added resellers and system integrators.

About The Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrants are copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure, 2Q07," Simon Hayward, Massimo Pezzini, Jess Thompson, Yefim V. Natis, June 1, 2007

2 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Service-Oriented Business Application Projects, 2Q07," Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Jess Thompson, Kimihiko Iijima, Michael Barnes, Daryl C. Plummer, Simon Hayward, May 31, 2007

3 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects, 2Q07," Massimo Pezzini, Michael Barnes, Kimihiko Iijima, David Gootzit, Yefim V. Natis, Daryl C. Plummer, Jess Thompson, Dale Vecchio, Janelle B. Hill, Simon Hayward, June 7, 2007

4 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects, 2Q07," Jess Thompson, Michael Barnes, Kimihiko Iijima, Benoit J. Lheureux, Paolo Malinverno, Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Roy W. Schulte, Simon Hayward, June 7, 2007

Spring apps on OSGI

In my post on April 6th, 2007 I mentioned about the availability of Spring OSGI’s first milestone. However, in that post I did not cover much of the details. Anyway, the specification of Spring-OSGI is now posted on Spring Framework’s site.



The specification mentions its goal to provide an “easier path to build Spring applications that can be deployed in an OSGi execution environment, and that can take advantage of the services offered by the OSGi framework”.

The Spring-OSGI effort targets to combine the best features of both OSGI and Spring. OSGI has its strength in providing a lightweight micro-kernel where modules (read “bundles” in OSGI) can be dynamically added or removed. OSGI also provides a better isolation. The isolation is useful to co-exist multiple version of the same service. It isolated the potential problems on class conflicts. Spring provides an easy to use framework based on DI and AOP powered with various services (Spring ecosystem). Thus the combination targets, (I am listing benefits listed in the specs into two separate buckets), to give benefits from both the worlds:

Benefits inherited from OSGI
· Better separation of application logic into modules
· The ability to deploy multiple versions of a module concurrently
· The ability to dynamically discover and use services provided by other modules in the system
· The ability to dynamically deploy, update and undeploy modules in a running system
Benefits inherited from Spring:
· Use of the Spring Framework to instantiate, configure, assemble, and decorate components within and across modules.
· A simple and familiar programming model for enterprise developers to exploit the features of the OSGi platform.
In a recent interview, Interface21’s CTO Andrian Colyer, elaborated a practical and interesting scenario of using the Spring-OSGI. If a service in use needs an upgrade, behind the scene, you can bring down the service and replace with the newer upgraded service without any glitch. Spring OSGI combination manages the switching of services in the background. Spring provides a stable proxy in this scenario while OSGI provides dynamic lifecycle and versioning.” SpringOSGI solves this problem not only for ‘stateless’ services but for ‘stateful’ services too.

We may see various service platforms leveraging this powerful combination. However, Spring-OSGi might not be the only app framework based on OSGI. e.g. OSGI based Microkernel servers currently offered by different vendors are not Spring based. In addition to Spring-OSGi combination, some independend work being done to map SCA and OSGI. Moreover, OSGI itself is going through further enhancement to support distributed case. Some ESB vendors may have a look at OSGI either for dynamic services. Anyway, With such different pieces working together, more powerful platforms may emerge. The combined platforms would be effectively used to build large and complex enterprise applications. (On a side note: There is another effort, JSR 312 for JBI 2.0, in java world to combine SCA and OSGI “like features” . I commented on the efforts in my earlier post )

Spring
OSGI
JBI

BEA too entered in CEP market ..

A report from Gartner had listed CEP in a list of rising technologies in their Hype Cycle. Per Gartner, CEP is important to give a competitive advantage in 2007 and it will be "requirement" in 2008. However, per Gartner, it would take a few years to mature the technology. Currently there are different players in the market ranging from niche vendors to one-shop vendors. Oracle, Apama(Progress), IBM, Tibco, Streambase, Coral8, Apsoft, KnowNow, are few to mention. Additionally, there are open source solutions like Esper and academic projects in various universities. Last week BEA too announced a first beta of CEP. It is an indication of growing interest in the field. More vendors entering into the market is generally better for maturity of the field. A standardization of language like CQL would be an important step towards achieving the maturity.
CEP

JSR 314 for JSF2.0 started

This JSR got approval in review ballot. http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=314