REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Jan. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 2005 represented a breakthrough year for Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware, Oracle's highly popular family of middleware software that simplifies the development, deployment, integration and management of applications. The year included a number of distinctive "firsts," including: first to market with an integrated, standards-based Application Platform Suite (APS), first APS designed for Grid, first APS to support comprehensive Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-driven Architecture (EDA), and first APS to integrate Enterprise Security, Identity Management and Business Intelligence. In addition, Oracle Fusion Middleware was rated the best selling middleware suite in units and the fastest growing middleware suite in revenues and units -- growing 24 percent on a trailing 12-month basis.

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Oracle Fusion Middleware will also serve as the infrastructure that powers Oracle Project Fusion -- the driving force behind next generation Oracle Applications. Further demonstrating its commitment to Oracle's Enterprise Applications customers, Oracle completed certification of Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards Applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g Release 2. These customers can now leverage the power of Oracle Fusion Middleware to protect and extend their investments in their Enterprise Applications.

Strength and Adoption of Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle Fusion Middleware demonstrated its increasing strength in the market in 2005 and is now used by more 28,500 customers -- representing over 35 of the world's 50 largest companies and more than 750 of the BusinessWeek Global 1000. Oracle Fusion Middleware customers included leading organizations in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Health Care and Public Sector industries. Oracle Fusion Middleware is also supported by 7,500 partners with more than 500 new ISVs, and hundreds of new Value-added Resellers (VARs) adopting the product over the past year.

Customers Exploit Best-of-Breed, "Hot Pluggable" Technology

Oracle Fusion Middleware introduced a number of best-of-breed products during 2005, including advances in J2EE, Application Frameworks, SOA Tools, Web Services Management, Business Rules, BPEL Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Analytics, and Identity Provisioning, Identity Management and Federation. Customers, partners, industry analysts and leading technology publications recognize Oracle Fusion Middleware's best-in-class technologies, support of industry standards and its unique "hot-pluggable" architecture. Today, customers and partners use Oracle Fusion Middleware's "hot-pluggable" capabilities to deploy components of the suite on a range of popular operating systems and to interoperate with middleware technologies and business applications from software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP.

During 2005, Oracle also further tightened the integration between Oracle Fusion Middleware and many popular Open Source technologies -- ANT, AXIS, CVS, Eclipse, Hibernate, myFaces, PERL, PHP, Spring, Struts, SubVersion and Tomcat -- providing customers the widest possible choice in exploiting best of breed technologies for SOA.

Industry Influencers Recognize Oracle Fusion Middleware

Leading research firms throughout the year recognized Oracle Fusion Middleware's overall APS, enterprise service bus and enterprise application server. Specifically, Forrester Research recognized Oracle as a leader in its Application Server Suites, Enterprise Service Bus and Enterprise Application Server Forrester Wave(TM)(1) reports. In addition to industry analysts, editors and readers of leading technology publications lauded Oracle Fusion Middleware's technical capabilities with several awards and honors. These publications include CRN, DM Review, eBizQ, InfoWorld, Intelligent Enterprise, Java Developer Journal, Network Computing, Network World, SD Times, VARBusiness and Web Services Journal.

Continued Leadership in Industry Standards

An ongoing commitment to open standards is central to Oracle's vision and product strategy for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Standards make it easier for customers to share data between applications and to protect and extend their technology investments. Oracle's leadership role with industry and technical standards and specifications is key to enabling Oracle Fusion Middleware's "hot-pluggable" capabilities. As a result, during 2005 Oracle spearheaded and supported several projects including:

* Leader and contributor in over 50 new specifications for the JCP, OASIS, WS-I, W3C, Liberty, OMG and several other standard bodies * Co-specification lead for the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 specification * Lead for the EJB 3.0 Object-Relational Mapping project in the Eclipse Foundation * Lead for the JavaServer Faces (JSF) Tooling project in the Eclipse Foundation * Co-lead for the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) tooling project in the Eclipse Foundation * Core contributor to Apache MyFaces * Co-authored the Service Component Architecture and Service Data Object specifications for SOA development * Board member and vice president of the Liberty Alliance, chair of the Liberty Conformance Expert Group, active participant in the Public Policy Expert, Business and Market, Technology and Strong Authentication Expert Groups About Oracle

Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com/ .

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(1) The Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q3 2005, Forrester Research, Inc., October 2005.

The Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Service Bus, Q4 2005, Forrester Research, Inc., November 2005.

The Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Applications Software Licensing, Q4 2005, Forrester Research, Inc., November 2005.

CONTACT: Rebecca Hahn, +1-714-445-4611, or rebecca.hahn@oracle.com, or
Letty Ledbetter, +1-650-506-8071, or letty.ledbetter@oracle.com, both of
Oracle

Web site: http://www.oracle.com/