Independent Analyst Firm Ranks Oracle as Number 1 in Application Deployment Software Market in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan)

Oracle Now #1 in Middleware in Asia

On July 1, 2008, Oracle unveiled BEA’s role in product strategy for next generation middlware. Oracle President Charles Phillips and Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian described how the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware creates a best-in-class combination for customers, partners and ISVs.

Oracle is now the largest middleware company in the world. Oracle Fusion Middleware has been the fastest growing middleware suite in the industry for the past seven years. Combined with BEA, Oracle’s middleware installed base now stands at 77,000. This acquisition will result in an expansion of Oracle’s partner ecosystem to 11,000 partners and 5000 ISVs. With the inclusion of BEA, Oracle is #1 in middleware globally, in Asia Pacific and in key markets like China and India.

Charles Phillips stressed investment protection for customers. “All BEA products will continue
under the existing BEA support timeline. There will be no forced migration at all. No policy in
Oracle would require any BEA customer to migrate.”

Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President for Product Development, Oracle Fusion Middleware,
said, “Our middleware strategy was to provide a complete and integrated middleware suite to
enable our customers and partners and ISVs to develop and deploy applications on the Internet
using a Service-Oriented Architecture and then to manage these applications with the lowest
total cost of ownership.”

Roger Li, Group Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware for Oracle Asia Pacific, cited phenomenal reactions from customers like Haier and Guangdong Telecom from China, India Railways and BAE Systems in Australia about the combined Oracle and BEA entity. Partners HP, Satyam, Neusoft and Red Rock Consulting also expressed their endorsement of Oracle’s middleware strategy and enlarged portfolio, welcoming the greater choice and flexibility to choose from a broader set of middleware components.

“Customers feel they will benefit from a more complete vision for a Service-Oriented Architecture. Customers want to take advantage of our comprehensive solutions for Business Process Management, Identity Management, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Content Management.”

Kurian listed four primary principles to Oracle Fusion Middleware’s product strategy:
· Complete and integrated - a unified, technically engineered suite of middleware which is modular so customers can choose the component they want; components are based on open standards to enable interoperability in heterogeneous environments.
· Develop and deploy applications on a Web-based Service-Oriented Architecture model so that services can be integrated together using flexible standards-based business processes that can be quickly and easily changed or configured in response to business needs.
· Using business intelligence to identify how business processes can be optimized and then presenting the information to a common content management and enterprise tool, user interface or user interaction layer.
· Lower the total cost of ownership by managing three different elements - managing the systems and applications that run on it, managing the services for SOA governance and then managing the users and their associated security principles for identity management - all being able to do this using low cost hardware and storage.

Both Oracle and BEA middleware products are classified into three buckets - strategic products,
continue and converge and products which are in maintenance.

· Strategic products refer to BEA products that are going to be adopted immediately with very little redesign or re-architecture into Oracle Fusion Middleware. In the vast majority of these cases, these BEA products are complementary to Oracle technology. Where there are overlaps, the corresponding Oracle products will converge with the BEA product in a rapid fashion over a six- to 18-month month period.
· Continue and converge products will be incrementally redesigned to incorporate Fusion Middleware technology. These products continue for at least another nine years.
· The maintenance product category contains products that BEA had put into maintenance mode prior to the Oracle acquisition. These products continue under maintenance with the same timeframe as BEA had communicated prior to the Oracle acquisition.

With this announcement, Oracle has articulated a very clear, well-defined, integrated product strategy spanning BEA WebLogic, BEA AquaLogic, Tuxedo and the broad existing Oracle Fusion Middleware product portfolio. Oracle has reinforced that it will continue to protect and enhance existing customer investments in both Oracle and BEA technologies. Oracle is integrating these best of breed products and adding features into an overall broader product suite – possible because Oracle has significantly broadened the Oracle and BEA R&D investment in middleware as well as in sales and support.

In closing, Oracle executives reinforced customers now have the best middleware suite in the industry, the best middleware components in the industry, and the broadest range of choices with well-defined options on how they can move forward.