News

Oracle Enterprise Manager Upgrade Released

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• March 3, 2009

Oracle is targeting OEM as an alternative to managing its databases, infrastructure platforms, middleware and enterprise apps with third-party management suites -- notably from CA, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and BMC, said Forrester analyst J.P. Garbani.

"Most of the money we are spending in on IT is on people, deployment, and monitoring and change in configuration," Garbani said. "If you can simply automate all of that and give me all of that in a box, you will save a lot of money, and that is really where Oracle is going."

The company's new Oracle Enterprise Manger 10g Release 5 (10gR5) adds support for the latest versions of its application and database platforms including Siebel CRM 8.1.1 and the 11g database, as well as extended integration with its Beehive collaboration server, Oracle WebLogic Java-based integration application server and applications tied to the Oracle Fusion middleware for building services-oriented architectures. 

For Oracle database developers and administrators, the new release adds real-time SQL monitoring and support for new Oracle 11g database advisors that provide recommendations for partitioning and data-recovery.

The new release should appeal to application DBAs that manage the development lifecycle from test to production and change management, said Richard Sarwal, Oracle's senior vice president of engineering, in a webcast today announcing 10gR5.

It also promises improved SOA management capability by providing management of the Oracle's BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. Oracle also released its new Oracle VM Management Pack, which allows 10gR5 to manage the lifecycle of virtualized infrastructures.

The VM Management Pack includes deployment, policy management, diagnostics and high-availability capabilities such as automatic load balancing, server pooling and failover. "VM Manager automates the complete lifecycle of the Oracle virtual machine server and the virtual machine guest," Sarwal said.

The suite adds numerous new capabilities for the Oracle customer set, according to Forrester's Garbani, but he added it will be years before the company can deliver on the promise of integrated management across its disparate products.

"Today, that strategy is not totally in place so it's not yielding the results that are expected. It will take a couple of years before seeing exactly where it is going," he said. "But I think it's going in the right direction."

Oracle is building much of its strategy on a slew of acquisitions that include ClearApp, Empirix, Moniforce and last month's purchase of mValent. The latter represents Oracle's push into application configuration management. Because the mValent deal just closed, Oracle has not revealed much about it.

"What I can tell you is what drew us to [mValent] was their ability to ensure consistent configurations across IT environments, and their support for ongoing environment and technology changes," Sarwal said.