The company is positioning SOA as a major theme at the Oracle OpenWorld conference and on Monday unveiled Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3 (http://weblog.infoworld.com/tcdaily/archives/2006/10/oracle_soa_suit.html) , featuring governance. SOA based on Oracle's Fusion Middleware platform was the focus of a keynote presentation Tuesday by Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of server technologies development.

"There's a new architecture that's emerged, which today in the industry is called services-oriented architecture," Kurian said.

"Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle's integrated and standards-based set of tools and middleware to allow you to develop enterprise applications on a services-oriented architecture," Kurian said. Fusion, he said, features technologies to build a services-oriented application and set business rules. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), meanwhile, provides a visual or declarative way to build service-oriented applications based on Java, Kurian said. He cited Monster.com as a user of Fusion Middleware to enable SOA.

Analyst Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management Software at IDC lauded Oracle's SOA strategy. "I think Oracle's in a really strong position given the ownership that they have of the application stack," Ballou said. But she questioned whether Oracle has gaps to fill related to application lifecycle management for services.

"The questions I have as an application lifecycle management analyst are around specific approaches in developing services for test and quality management, change management and governance," Ballou said.