With 45,000 attendees expected at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco (in a few days) and 1,500 conference sessions – speculation is rife about what’s going to be the hottest topics.
There’s little doubt that Oracle’s new Application Integration Architecture (AIA) will be one of them.
What is Oracle AIA technology and why such a huge interest in the subject?
Oracle AIA was unveiled in April by Oracle president Charles Phillips, who devoted a good part of his speech at Oracle’s Collaborate conference to the topic.
Simply defined, AIA is an integration mechanism – it’s a bunch of Oracle products designed to support integration across a wide range of Oracle applications, as well as non-Oracle applications.
So what’s the big deal?
Well right now enterprises are clamouring for technologies that would enable them to deploy cross-functional business processes much more effectively that they’ve been able to do in the past.
As Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Inc. says in a podcast, “the majority of enterprise applications are siloed within individual lines of business – and this makes coordinating activity between them very difficult. That’s where the cross functional process improvement effort comes into play and they’re very much in demand.”
That makes a whole lot of sense today, given that business processes frequently run across multiple silos.
The problem is that IT environment in large enterprises are quite often a dog’s breakfast of heterogeneous apps from multiple vendors, alongside custom made software.
Automating business processes across the boundaries of these multiple apps is usually a very laborious, complex and time consuming task.
Oracle AIA seeks to simplify this process and make it more seamless – and far less costly.