Oracle launched Fusion Middleware 11g to UK customers today at an event in London, after making initial announcements about the release in the US on Wednesday.

The updated platform is being touted by the firm as the first complete middleware solution on the market.

Oracle president Charles Phillips said that the IT industry had never really defined the middleware category.

"Companies tend to specialise in different middleware components, like business intelligence or data management, and most of these components are proprietary," he said.

"We said these components are all related in our mind and so middleware should be a related suite of products that supports applications. It is the level where application standards are defined, such as how applications are deployed or their security processes."

The new Fusion release contains integration with products elsewhere in Oracle's portfolio, such as the Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, WebCenter Suite and Identity Management software.

A new set of developer tools are part of the WebLogic Suite update, which is aimed at allowing enterprises to deploy reliable applications more quickly and at a lower cost.

"We are providing developers with all the features they need to build applications in a single environment to enhance their productivity," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Fusion Middleware senior vice president.

Customers have a choice between the JDeveloper Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which allows them to build applications across application servers, or the Eclipse IDE, which allows them to integrate with open-source products.

Other new features include Fusion Middleware Gridlink for Oracle Real Application Clusters that optimises integration between database clustering and application server clustering to enable improved performance in clustered architectures at a low cost.

Businesses wanting to upgrade to WebLogic Suite 11g from Oracle Application Server 10g can use the Fusion Middleware Upgrade Tool for Java EE.