Customers are looking for interoperability, but not necessarily a single-vendor solution, according to Schmelzer. "And so, we'll have to see what wins the tug-of-war: greater vendor choice through interoperability and loose coupling, or reduced vendor selection for purposes of efficiency," Schmelzer said.

Components of the suite include: Oracle BPEL Process Manager, for mapping out business process flows; Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, for connecting existing IT systems and business partners as a set of services; Oracle Web Services Manager, providing a console for setting Web services policies; and Oracle Business Rules Engine, for defining and managing business rules.

Release of the suite marks the first time Oracle Enterprise Service Bus has been separated from the company's application server.

Other middleware products in the suite are Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, for insight into business operations; Oracle Enterprise Manager, for managing service-oriented applications; and Oracle JDeveloper 10g, which is Oracle's application development environment for Java applications.