To become Oracle Specialized, Recognizes by Oracle and Preferred by Customers you just have to take the SOA assessment. The new program will be launched December 1st so time to prepare.

For more information on OPN specialization please visit the Oracle Partner Network
For questions please feel free to post them at our OPN specialized wiki

To become a member in the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required)

Happy New Year! our SOA Partner Adoption blog celebrates its first year anniversary. A year ago we started with the SOA Partner Advisory Council, in a few days we will host our fifth SOA Partner Advisory Council during OOW. The advisory council is key for our joint business. You as a partner can discussion with Oracle SOA product and development based on case studies around SOA solution and influence our future direction. We from Oracle learn & understand, engage/ enhance partnering with key partners e.g. review SOA business plan or SOA Suite 11g go to market strategy.

To learn more about our SOA Partner Advisory Councils please become a member in the Oracle SOA Partner Community. For registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa

For more information become a SOA Partner Community member www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa
See you at Oracle Open World 2009! Jürgen Kress

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is a pivotal launch for all Oracle partners, representing the latest incarnation of the most comprehensive, customer-proven family of pre-integrated, industry-leading middleware available to date. This premier application infrastructure foundation was developed to empower enterprises to create and run flexible, intelligent business applications and optimise IT efficiency by exploiting modern hardware and software architectures.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the only middleware available from any vendor that is complete, integrated, hot-pluggable and best-of-breed. What this means, is that Oracle customers can: work with a single strategic partner for all their Middleware needs; have the peace of mind brought by seamless interoperability between Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database and Oracle Applications; ensure all industry standards are exceeded; and be confident that they have chosen the most efficient, cost-effective and powerful Middleware ever built.
Featuring increased functionality across its product portfolio, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes new capabilities in the Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Identity Management. It simplifies the complexity of IT, while integrating modern application infrastructure requirements for streamlined development, SOA, cloud computing, business process transformation, Service-Oriented Security, enhanced collaboration and IT governance
At the launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Thomas Kurian, Oracle Senior Vice President Server Technologies said: "With the release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, more than 90,000 current customers gain a foundation for innovation to further differentiate their organisations from competitors and efficiently identify and respond to changes in their business. Offering further integrations within and across the product line and major technical innovations in every product category, Oracle is helping customers realise the promise of modern IT efficiency."

Features, Benefits and Strategy
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g will play a key role in Oracle's entire future product strategy.
You'll hear it again and again from excited partners and customers - this is a huge release because it is so complete, integrated, open and best-of-breed.
At Oracle we believe very strongly in the power of integration coupled with openness. Our Middleware underlies our entire technology stack, a significant part of which must run seamlessly across third-party servers in heterogeneous environments. Catering for the complete horizontal and vertical needs of our customers has always been our aspiration. Our desire to be best-of breed is also a key element. We're fiercely attached to leading Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves and any other recognised analyst metrics, so we develop and acquire the best technology and integrate it across our stack to extend our lead in Middleware.

"Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is by far the most comprehensive middleware stack now available on the market. Its open and integrated nature enables us to make even more flexible and adaptive solutions for our customers. We had to wait a bit longer than we expected but it was worth the wait!"
Mike van Alst, Principle Consultant at IT-eye
Mike's Blog Mike's Oracle Mix profile

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g features close to 3000 new features and has been in planning for quite some time. Specifically, it fully embraces the functionality of BEA, combining two technology stacks into one integrated platform. It delivers major enhancements to SOA and BPM, Security and Identity Management, Portals and Collaboration. New features also underpin our Applications Grid, providing our Extreme Performance and Transaction Processing customers with the high availability, high-scalability, low-latency applications they demand. The service infrastructure supports our whole grid of modular next generation apps. We have created an infrastructure for highly available application deployments enabling a more mission-critical style of SOA application development. From a partner perspective, a highly-scalable, highly-available platform enables developers to deliver a new-breed of apps for end customers.
We are also now pleased to be able to offer our partners and customers a comprehensive set of pre-integrated, open and manageable Enterprise 2.0 services. Centred around Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g and Oracle WebCenter Services 11g our Middleware simplifies the development of secure Enterprise 2.0 enabled portals, composite applications, websites and more. It's all about putting productivity back into the hands of our partners and customers and enabling them to rapidly create their own working environments, user interactions and online communities. We're delivering a richer experience for business users and a powerful standards-based framework for developers.
It's also important to mention several performance enhancements that offer a better user experience for Oracle Identity Management 11g partners. We have enabled tighter integration within the IDM product portfolio and also with the larger Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. All IDM products now use common Fusion Middleware components and services such as a single installer, shared infrastructure services for encryption, meta-data management, auditing and logging, and common systems management. Additionally, these products are now certified on a broader and consistent set of technology platforms giving customers unparalleled choices for deployment. We are also delivering the foundation for a unique concept called Service-Oriented Security (SOS), which is all about enabling identity management functionalities for applications via reusable shared service interfaces. With SOS, we are abstracting the complexity of implementing security artifacts into applications. Developers can now seamlessly weave security into their applications, as well as rapidly deploy them into an enterprise identity management framework. 11g also offers a modern unified user interface based on Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces which is tailored to offer an enriched administrator experience.
The release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g represents a huge step forward for ourselves, our partners and end customers, but it is also the beginning of the evolution, not an end in itself. We are already looking forward to bringing you a train of new and exciting releases attached to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g over next 12months that will follow up on this primary release and deliver even more functionality, integration and innovation.
Opportunities for Partners

"Oracle Fusion Middleware allows me to design advanced architecture and implement enterprise level systems for my clients. This platform brings everything together - standard enterprise patterns, rich frameworks and reliable security. Because we can use rich sets of pre-developed, reusable components, this improves development quality and helps to speed up implementation process. My clients think that Oracle Fusion Middleware is the number one enterprise platform."
Andrejus Baranovskis, Independent Oracle Consultant and CEO for Red Samurai Consulting
Andrejus's Blog Andrejus's Oracle Mix profile

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g serves as a Foundation for Innovation, extending our commitment to Oracle's unique, fundamental design principles while presenting myriad new opportunities and positionings for our partners. It is essential that all relevant partners adopt Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and get trained up on the new features and possibilities as soon as possible.
System Integrator (SI) partners understand the industry requirements and key business processes of their customers. Therefore they can implement and integrate our Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions. Our Partner Communities will support SIs to generate more service revenue and to complete projects faster based on Oracle Fusion Middleware technology.
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can use the same proven Oracle Fusion Middleware technology that Oracle is using itself to build Fusion applications. Therefore they can easily integrate into Oracle and third party applications and adopt customer processes. The Partner Communities will support them to build faster and more flexible solutions based on Oracle Fusion Middleware technology.
Our Middleware Resellers enjoy a good deal of commitment on both sides of the partner relationship, which is gratifying for everyone involved. At Oracle we make full use of the open market model (OMM). This is a channel opportunity registration programme that helps us recognise the contribution of partners to the Oracle economy, regardless of their business model. Partners can resell by registering deals upfront, they can refer opportunities to Oracle and qualify to earn a 5 percent referral fee, or they can co-sell and receive acknowledgement for opportunities in which they played a strategic role in the sale by providing assistance to Oracle. OMM ensures better sales alignment, improves win rates, and shares sales intelligence. It ensures partners bring us opportunities and that we are very happy to work jointly with them. In our last quarter, 24 percent of technology reselling was in the Middleware space.
Because our partners are key to extracting full value from Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, we kick-started our whole partner training roadshow back in January, working with beta releases. This meant that key partners were trained up with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g before it went out on the market, each benefitting from a half a day executive briefing, half a day technical briefing, plus our very popular workshops. This training, which many more partners are currently undertaking, is an important anchorage for our Middleware partner communities. We provide various touch-points for education and partner interactions, including online conferences and our Mix group, embracing every aspect of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g portfolio from SOA and BPA, to Security and IDM, BI and Enterprise 2.0.
Our Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g communities are already proving really popular with over 1500 very active members to date and rapidly growing memberships. They are the first places that partners go to receive the latest product information, marketing opportunities, joint campaign possibilities, iLearnings, webcasts and more. Communities offer partners a unique way to enhance their day-to-day work, not only to find out about the latest news and training, but to network with other community members. Our partners really want play an active role, to invest their own time and give us as much feedback as they can. In return we offer them information and support for training, education, marketing, pre-built campaign kits, budgeting guidance, joint value propositions and target customers and GTMIs.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the result of more than three years of planning, investment, testing and feedback from our long-standing partners. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g can help partners to deliver flexible business processes for a very wide range of customer needs. It's critical that end customers work with Oracle partners wherever possible to ensure they benefit from the wealth of knowledge and experience our partners are developing all the time, as well as growing their businesses through the deployment of Oracle technology.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Executive and Technical Briefings for Partners
At each of these comprehensive, in-person briefings, senior Oracle managers will provide an executive overview, list value propositions and detail new features available in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g product stack. These briefings all include WebCenter.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Partner Executive and Technical Briefing:
• 2nd September: Turkey, Istanbul
• 8th September: Czech Republic, Prague
• 9th September: Austria, Vienna
• 10th September: Poland, Krakow
• 11th September: Russia, Moscow
• 14th September: Romania, Bucharest
• 15th September: Italy, Milan (exec only)
• 16th September: Norway, Lysakar
• 17th September: London, UK (tech only)
• 17th September: Switzerland, Baden-Daetwill (exec only)
• 24th September: Switzerland, Baden-Daetwill (tech only)
• 25th September: France, Paris (tech only)
• 29th September: Italy, Milan (tech only)
• 6th October: Jordan, Amman
• 12th October: Eqypt, Cairo
• 14th October: Saudi Arabia, Riyad
• 16th October: Greece, Athens
Registration is FREE but seating is limited. Register Here Today!

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch - Recordings Now Available
Earlier this month we held a very successful virtual conference to launch FMW 11g to customers and partners. These recordings are now available at the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch Center. including the WebCenter 11g Release session from Jim Sullivan, Enterprise 2.0 Product Manager, EMEA. and the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Partner Launch Webcast from Clemens Utschig-Utschig, SOA Senior Principal Product Manager.

Watch the videocast with Andrew Sutherland and Stein Surlien.

To become a member in the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required)

Next Generation SOA
We are at a stage in the evolution of service-oriented computing where modern service technology innovation is building upon mature service platforms at the same time that proven delivery techniques and design patterns are building upon the established service-orientation design paradigm. These developments have made it possible to build service-oriented solutions of unprecedented sophistication and to take the realization of service-orientation to new levels. At the same time, there are new risks, complexities, and pitfalls that need to be understood in order to make the most of what the current SOA industry has to offer. This new book explains Next Generation SOA in plain English and is suitable for any IT professional interested in learning about where modern-day SOA is at today and where it is heading.

Authors (in alphabetical order): Pethuru Cheliah, Thomas Erl, Berthold Maier, Vijay Narayanan, Hajo Normann, Bernd Trops, Clemens Utschig-Utschig, Torsten Winterberg

SOA Symposium
• October 22-23, 2009 World Trade Center - Rotterdam, Netherlands
• World's Largest and most comprehensive SOA event for practitioners!
• Over 85 Expert Speaker Sessions across 14 Tracks
• Speakers Include: Thomas Erl, David Chappell, Clemens Utschig, Manas Deb, Linus Malmberg, Dirk Krafzig, Torsten Winterberg, Nicolai Josuttis

Customer get a 10% discount on the registration fee (use partner code "SOAORC10" when registering at www.soasymposium.com. Oracle SOA Partner Community members get a special 20% discount - details are posted at SOA Partner Community. For SOA Partner Community registration please go to www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa

Now our ACE Director Hajo Normann is online – make sure that you read his blog!
Hajo is one of the most experience SOA Architects, as he managed several large SOA implementations. All of his customers are extremely successful as they achieve an ROI in their SOA implementations. Just to highlight one of them Kabel Deutschland. Christina Kählig from Kabel Deutschland can justify as well the business value by becoming much more flexible as well the financial value by re-using SOA components and reduce time to market and improve customer support. For you as a partner is a great opportunity to learn from Hajos implementations and to share your experiences.
If you have some experience around Oracle SOA and you are an Oracle partner we would like to encourage you to write a blog and add it to our SOA Blogs Wiki

Mike van Alst Priciple Consultant at IT-eye

“Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is by far the most comprehensive middleware stack now available on the market. Its open and integrated nature enables us to make even more flexible and adaptive solutions for our customers. We had to wait a bit longer than we expected but it was worth the wait!”

Blog: http://soamastery.blogspot.com Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/16403-mike-van-alst

Lucas Jellema CTO of AMIS

"The essence of SOA is achieving business agility, through decoupling and reuse. The new 11g release of the SOA Suite builds on years of experience with applying SOA in the real world and on open standards and advanced technology that has been maturing very rapidly over the last few years. With SOA Suite 11g we start to reap the benefits of these developments:
- support for Composite Applications (based on the SCA standard) that tightly integrate the main service engines and especially deployment has become so much easier and more elegant
- much improved and integrated management console: all of SOA Suite in one place, integrated in Enterprise Manager; managing the SOA Suite in daily operations has been somewhat challenging; this new console will really make life a lot easier for SOA Administrators
- SOA Suite 11g brings support for extreme decoupled architecture (EDA or Event Driven Architecture)-based through the Event Delivery Network
- integration with ADF”
Blog: http://technology.amis.nl/blog Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/23261-lucas-jellema

Ronald van Luttikhuizen Architect for Approach Alliance

"The great thing about the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard -on which Oracle SOA Suite 11g is based- is that you do not need to expose low-level mediator services and adapter functionality as a separate external service. It can be a local component to a composite and therefore not visible to other service composites. This promotes much better integration and encapsulation of infrastructure and low-level services. You only need to expose those artifacts that are -or will be- reusable!"
Blog: http://www.approach-alliance.nl Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/24440-ronald-van-luttikhuizen

Andrejus Baranovskis Independent Oracle Consultant and CEO for Red Samurai Consulting

“Oracle Fusion Middleware allows to design advanced architecture and implement enterprise level systems for my clients. This platform brings all together - standard enterprise patterns, rich frameworks and reliable security. We can use rich set of already developed reusable components, this improves development quality and helps to speed up implementation process. My clients think - Oracle Fusion Middleware is Nr. 1 enterprise platform.”
Blog: http://andrejusb.blogspot.com/ Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/13850-andrejus-baranovskis

Edwin Biemond Architect at Whitehorses

“With SOA Suite FMW 11G you can build composite applications in which Mediators ( ESB Routers), BPEL , Human Tasks and Business rules can work perfectly together. You can configure this composite application in one project which makes deployment very easy. Some great new adapters like SDO, EJB and Socket adapter. Human Task views and email can be customized with ADF so it can be fully integrated in your own Company applications. And SOA Suite 11G Mediator component can react on Events which are delivered by the Event Delivery Network.”
Blog: http://biemond.blogspot.com/ Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/22120-edwin-biemond

Hajo Normann Oracle ACE Director, Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA at EDS an HP Company

“There is an attribute of SOA Suite 11g I really like which is easily overlooked among the overwhelming wealth of new features: Although SCA adds yet another technology to the acronym zoo in modern middleware, it rather not increases complexity, but decreases it. Through SCA as a bundling technology it becomes easier to understand an assembly of the constituents of a composite such as a BPEL process, a human interaction, some rules and routing logic. In earlier versions those have been scattered over JDeveloper and we had to figure out through clicking around how they fit together. Now these puzzle pieces of a composite are graphically grouped in one view, so it becomes way easier to grasp what is actually going on and get started. This reduction of complexity continues during deployment and administration, you always look at one bundle, a SCA composite. This reduction of complexity promises to help adoption of SOA based on Oracle Fusion Middleware.”
Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/22654-hajo-normann

Nathalie Roman ACE Director / Competence Leader iAdvise FM Team at iAdvise

“Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g has finally arrived and it'll give as well developers as customers the possibility to implement bleeding edge technology throughout the Oracle Stack. Just looking at the different features and functionalities that have been build into the stack is amazing and most of all, you can't get round fusion anymore. In other words SCA Suite, Webcenter Suite, Forms, Reports and Fusion Apps will use the same infrastructure which will enable the usage of consistent admin and management tools whilst leveraging capabilities of the infrastructure and database throughout the entire stack. My 2 cents ... Fusion has become a reality with unlimited functionality and features ! Working within a forms , JEE , DB or Apps environment, everyone will be using the same technologies throughout the stack ... The fusion ages kicked in!”
Blog: http://iadvise.blogspot.com/ Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/12011-nathalie-roman

Thorsten Winterberg Head of the Competence Center SOA at Opitz Consulting

“Looking for real EDA? Check out for Oracle SOA Suite 11g.The new EDN (event delivery network) is a simple, but important feature, which allows very easy development of event driven architectures. We get an event definition language to build events of special types. A mediator can publish events as routing rule or subscribe to events to initiate some logic. Best feature: the loose coupling through the events is tied together again in the runtime console, where you can see all events, the publishers and the consumers, even the flow traces show the call stacks of event.”
Blog: http://torstenwinterberg.blogspot.com Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/12389-torsten-winterberg

Mark Simpson Director of SOA at Griffiths Waite

"The release of Fusion Middleware 11g has been eagerly anticipated and it is great to see it ready for production release. The current 10g middleware stack has enabled us to deliver automated, agile and visible business processes for a large number of customers using components within SOA Suite and BPM Suite including BPEL, Rules, BPM, BAM and ESB.
 
The release of SOA Suite 11g is worthy of the term next generation - it greatly extends the current stack with key functionality, such as richer support for events, extended packaging and deployment options, a Java version of Business Activity Monitoring component, new user interface for Business Rules, better and more extensible Human Workflow, more use of ADF as the strategic framework for building user interfaces and a multitude of important enhancements to each individual component.
 
In addition to key new features, SOA11g is the first fully integrated enterprise SOA infrastructure available from Oracle (and on the market if you compare the necessary features for an enterprise class rollout of SOA), bringing together seamlessly the best components from the BEA and Oracle stacks. Choosing Weblogic Server as the foundation for 11g SOA will allow us and our customers to leverage the comprehensive J2EE, Spring, transaction and thread management, messaging and clustering support from a best in class Application Server.
 
The integration spans the whole stack above the Application Server; all components are now fully integrated. The new support for Service Component Architecture (SCA) is providing a standardised assembly and deployment model to simplify the design and management of all the moving parts. Another key component in bringing all the pieces together is Metadata Services (MDS) - this is something we will be hearing a lot about over the next few years as it is one of the key elements of the whole Fusion Middleware Architecture. MDS is a metadata repository underpinning all components across FMW 11g allowing all components to access and is what enables the rich drill-down and navigation capabilities between the components at design and runtime - it will simplify the management of the your solutions and ensure compatibility with future releases.
 
FMW 11g is a major release, it has been 3 years in the making with a huge investment in testing - from what I have seen in the technology previews and early access releases it looks well worth the time spent."
Blog: http://soa247.blogspot.com/ Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/user_profiles/11701-mark-simpson

Send us your SOA Suite 11g experience and add your blog to our Wiki SOA Blogs!
To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please to to http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa

The next 12 months will be very exciting:
• Release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g with many exciting features like SCA, EDN, SOD, MDS and United Testing
• Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Summer Camps
• Oracle Open World October 11th – 15th 2009 in San Francisco
• Acquisition of Sun Microsystems

If you want to be part of it fell free to sign up for the SOA Partner Community: www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa