OFM 11g adds 3000 new features

In India, Oracle’s partners such as SysArc Infomatix and HCL Infosystems have migrated their software applications from competing middleware platforms to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. These migrations were completed with the help from Oracle India’s Partner Solution Center (PSC). Oracle has added close to 3000 new features in its middleware which the company claims reduces effective cost of the product.

Shailender Kumar, vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle India interacted with Prasoon Srivastava of CIOL to elaborate the details of the product and the company's strategy woven around it. Excerpts:

In todays' scenario of new launches and rapid evolution of technology, what is the message you would like to give CIOs on Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g?

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is a modern application infrastructure that significantly improves the agility and intelligence of business applications, while enabling organizations to exploit new hardware and software architectures for efficient IT execution and cost savings.

It extends Oracle's commitment to its unique, fundamental design principles and delivers new innovations that simplify the complexity of IT, while integrating modern application infrastructure requirements for simplified development, SOA, cloud computing, business process transformation, service-oriented security, enhanced collaboration and IT governance.

What are the key differentiating factors in OFM 11g compared to the rest of the middleware available in market?

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g has been developed with significant new product functionalities. OFM 11g has more than 2900 new features, which is four times as compared to other releases. This is one of the basic differentiator of OFM 11g from the rest.

In addition, it has the highest quality and automated upgrade with 13 million hours of automated testing and 376 customers in the largest beta ever during its global launch in June 2009. It will allow customers to dramatically simplify the process of incorporating security into their applications.

The suite-wide integration combined with a rich Web 2.0 administrative interface will help reduce resources required to deploy and manage security within the enterprise. It offers new and enhanced features which enable users to build and manage online business communities that help capture and strengthen relationships between people, processes, applications and information to increase insight and accelerate strategic decision-making.

Some of these technologies, like Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g, will enable enterprises to deploy reliable applications that can quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet changing business needs.

How have you planned to expand the reach of this product in Indian market?

Oracle in India works with more than 7000 customers who use our technology and applications products. In addition, we work with more than 500 partners in India alone and 20000 globally. This includes independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), value-added distributors (VADs), resellers, platform partners.

Very recently we partnered with Redington India to market our entire range of database, middleware and applications products. We already work with VAD's Ingram Micro and Sonata Software. We will tap all industries with Oracle Fusion Middleware products, the main industries being financial service industry, telecom, government, manufacturing, retail and healthcare.

Is there any focus that we may get to see for tier-2 and tier-3 cities this year?

Oracle operates across the country through our offices in the metro cities along with other cities namely Gurgaon, Bangalore and Hyderabad. We are widely present in other smaller cities of India through our VADs through our large partner network. Our value-added distributors, namely Ingram Micro, Redington India and Sonata Software, provide us the reach and penetration into the growth cities and to midsize companies.

How have you done pricing of this product?

There are different levels of pricing for Oracle 11g. We ensure that we give flexibility to our customers so that whatever they want to buy, whenever they want to buy, the kind of support they require and the pricing is tuned as per their requirement.