Oracle is preparing to launch its SOA Suite 10g Release 3 by this Autumn, and released a developer preview last week. 

The update bundles components of Oracle's Fusion middleware products which offer a set of common applications needed to create applications.

Oracle offers one version of its SOA Suite 10g R3 for the Oracle application server and one for third party application servers. The suite bundles Oracle's BPEL Process Manager, Web Services Manager, Business Activity Monitoring, Enterprise Service Bus, and Business Rules products. The version that's designed for Oracle's application server lacks the ESB and business rules product because those are already bundled with the application server.

Ashish Mohindroo, senior product director for Fusion middleware at Oracle, stressed that the Fusion applications are built with service oriented architectures (SOAs) in mind.

SOA is designed to build and maintain applications in an enterprise. Rather than designing applications from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company.

The main change in Oracle's new SOA product is that all the components have been bundled in a single suite. The individual components will also remain to be available as stand alone products.

"We have had all these components in the past. What we've done is to tie them all together into one unified cohesive platform," Mohindroo told vnunet.com. 

Bundling the applications in a single suite makes it easier for enterprises to manage their applications, he claimed.

"The value of running on a common metadata layer is that if I change a business rule, it is propagated across all the components of our SOA stack," said Mohindroo.

"It will be much simpler to make changes in the application and in the business logic than it was in the past when these components were available but were not as tightly integrated."

But Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, questioned the reasoning behind the bundling. "The whole idea of an SOA suite is a bit of an oxymoron," he told vnunet.com.

"SOA enables companies to take a best-of-breed approach to their software. You want to buy software that has standards that can interoperate with each other. If that's the case, then why would you buy a suite?"

"It begs the question of how well the pieces work separately. Does a customer need to buy into the complete suite to make it work? If so, then that is not a good way to do SOA."

The analyst added that, rather than creating a true SOA offering, Oracle is looking to mimic SAP's Netweaver single suite application development platform. 

"[Oracle] has its guns set on SAP. They see SAP as their competitor more so than IBM's Websphere or BEA. So they are looking to do what SAP does, and do it better," he said.