Oracle & BEA: Single BPEL & BPMN runtime!

Finally, we have an official statement about the product strategy that Oracle defined for the BEA weblogic, Tuxedo and Aqualogic!

Here is a summary, with the highlights from our point of view.

SOA Suite

Weblogic server will be the strategic JEE application server. Oracle application server will be supported mostly for Oracle Applications. SOA suite will still run on any JEE platform.
Service Component Architecture (SCA) will be the platform for SOA.
The ESB will be a combination of ALSB and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, combining the XQuery capabilities and other features of ALSB with the good features of Oracle. Basically, ALSB will be re-engineered so it runs on SCA. The Oracle ESB features will then be added to the ALSB.
Not surprisingly, WLI is not strategic, Oracle BPEL PM is.

BPM

Oracle will converge the Aqualogic BPM runtime and BPEL runtime to a common BPMN and BPEL engine to support four patterns of BPM: human centric, document centric, decision centric, system centric
The most important thing that was the plan to converge the runtime of Aqualogic BPM with the Oracle BPEL runtime. This is very good news, since there have been problems translating the two. They will keep to design time offerings: BPA suite for formal modeling, Aqualogic BPM designer for agile modeling.

Portals
Here the same thing happens: BEA products are merged with Oracle products. BEA WL portal is not strategic, Webcenter is. BEA Aqualogic Interaction is not strategic either, some of the components like Ensemble are though.

All in all, most of the choices make a lot sense to me. I am anxious to see the convergence of BPEL and BPMN with ALBPM and BPEL PM. The downside is, that there are now even more products in the stack. This makes it even harder for customers to make the right choice…. I wonder how BEA developers and architects feel about the choices that have been made.

By the way, another nice result of this merger is the new architect space on OTN. Go check it out!