Will Oracle's Java-based Fusion middleware 'fuse' with Java?

After nearly three years in development, Oracle yesterday officially launched Fusion Middleware 11g, its vast enterprise middleware suite, and kicked off the related "100 Days of Innovation" campaign, where the company will travel the world to show off the massive amount of new services contained in this release.

In the course of Fusion 11g's development, Oracle acquired more than 50 companies, and pulled in some 2,000 individual software improvements as a result. When you have a middleware platform as all-encompassing as that, unity among the platform's different services is critical to success.

"Any complex system that is not...engineered to work together is going to be costly and error-prone," said Oracle's President Charles Phillips in yesterday's presentation in Washington, DC. And the glue that holds together this monolithic stack is Java.

With Oracle's watershed acquisitions of BEA Systems in early 2008, Sun Microsystems last April, Oracle acquired both a leading Java Application server and the Java language itself.

Miko Matsumura, vice president and strategist at Software AG said, "The grand unifying theory of Oracle Fusion Middleware is BEA. And adding Sun Microsystems to the mix means that Java becomes more important to Oracle than even SQL."

For example, JDeveloper IDE and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), announced yesterday, are designed to create a simple visual environment for J2EE 5 and AJAX development which can be integrated into the WebLogic 11g application server, which has grown out of the BEA acquisition. All of the Fusion Middleware products ultimately hook up to JDeveloper.

"It used to be the database," Phillips said. "Now middleware [is] leading our technology growth."

Though Java plays a pivotal role in Fusion Middleware, Oracle is celebrating the platform instead through its 100 Days of Innovation Tour where the company will travel the world to spread the Fusion theme. Today, the company is in London, Paris, and Munich, and later this month will visit Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. It's very similar to a band touring the world in support of a new album.

A number of attendees at yesterday's presentation said that this tour is an attempt to prove that Oracle is not just a sprawling acquisition machine, but that it is also capable of developing its own ideas. Highlighting Java as a cornerstone of the product would not do well to propagate that message, since it was, after all, Sun's innovation.