Oracle is number 1 in middleware. Oracle's open, standards-based offerings make it the leader in modern middleware. Oracle plans to deliver increased functionality and capabilities across its broadened portfolio of products.

The company unveiled plans for the strategic BEA and Oracle Fusion Middleware products - including plans for Application Server, Tuxedo, BPM, WebCenter, SOA, Development Tools.

Oracle also plans to preserve and expand the partner ecosystem - including System Integrators, Independent Software Vendors, Value-Added Distributors and Value-Added Resellers - to help ease the deployment of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

"Oracle is number one in middleware", stated Oracle President Charles Philips. "The addition of BEA products to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite will accelerate innovation in our product offerings, and help our customers strategically implement middleware to more easily build, deploy, and manage applications in a secure environment."

"As a market leader in SOA implementation, Accenture has had extensive experience and success with both the Oracle and BEA middleware products. By combining leading products and technologies, Oracle has created an Oracle Fusion Middleware road map that is consistent with Accenture's assessment of how a converged product set would best benefit our clients. What's more, the convergence of the two products will increase the momentum of the solutions we develop at the Accenture Innovation Centers for Oracle, and provide a strong SOA platform for our clients", stated Paul Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology architect.

"The integration of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack and the BEA product family combined with Oracle's standards-based platform offers the potential of a compelling foundation for building solutions to fit the complex and varied collaborations between people, software and machines in today's hospital and health care environments", stated Rhett Alden, Senior Architect, GE Healthcare IT.

"Adopting SOA is a way to improve business performance. The combined Oracle & BEA middleware product direction provides greater opportunity to execute an effective SOA strategy and deployment that can help lower costs, increase agility and mitigate risks. HP will continue to leverage our consulting expertise in both Oracle and BEA products to help our joint customers accelerate SOA adoption and drive increased business value", stated John McCain, senior vice president and general manager, Consulting and Integration, HP.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a comprehensive, pre-integrated and hot-pluggable product line used by more than 65,000 customers worldwide in every industry. The comprehensive, standards-based family of middleware infrastructure products - ranging from the number 1 Java application server to leading Enterprise 2.0 portals and content management products - provides companies and the public sector with the technology solutions they need when they need them.

Oracle Fusion Middleware products are pre-integrated with one another and with Oracle Database and Applications products to enable a lower cost of ownership. Unique hot-pluggable capabilities allow customers to extend existing investments in heterogeneous IT environments. Oracle Fusion Middleware is supported by an ecosystem of more than 11,000 independent software vendors, value-added resellers and system integrators.