Organizations throughout the world are using Oracle Fusion Middleware, the company's comprehensive, standards- based family of middleware products to adopt and manage service-oriented architectures (SOA) in heterogeneous computing environments.

The SOA market is poised for tremendous growth over the next few years. According to a recent Gartner report, "SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of development projects, by 2008." Advanced Data Exchange, Cattles Bank, Griffiths Waite, the Mexican Government's Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, Neustar, Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Police, Spanish Regional Government, Universita di Bologna and Wyeth are a few of the growing number of organizations using components of the Oracle SOA Suite, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, to help maximize business efficiency, increase IT flexibility and lower costs.

Built on a hot-pluggable architecture, Oracle's SOA Suite enables organizations to rapidly deliver new business services -- based on a mix of old and new IT systems -- while avoiding costly rip-and-replace projects. The suite delivers a comprehensive service lifecycle management platform that enables services to be created, secured, monitored, managed and orchestrated into composite applications and multi-step business processes. Partners are using Oracle's products as the foundation for SOAs, decreasing the time spent re-architecting entire systems and increasing the time dedicated to building competitive, vertical differentiators and solving customers' business problems. Oracle SOA Suite boasts some of the industry's most advanced and well-regarded SOA technologies, including Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Oracle Business Rules Engine, Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Web Services Manager.

Advanced Data Exchange (ADX) is a privately held, venture-backed company headquartered in Fremont, Calif., providing services to build and expand trading communities by building upon the benefits of electronic data interchange (EDI) and XML without the typical cost or complexity. ADX improves commerce process execution, enabling customers and suppliers to efficiently exchange business documents, streamline orders, track and manage changes, resolve discrepancies, improve the accuracy of payments and the timeliness of receivables. Its use of Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle's EDI B2B Gateway brings flexibility and agility to ADX's technology platform, resulting in improved response times to customers, minimal manual data entry and improved accuracy.

"ADX drives efficiency in the buyer-supplier relationship. Our Business Integration and Commerce Management services allow electronic order processing and related communication with trading partners regardless of technology capabilities or data formats," said Carl Lehmann, vice president of solutions strategy at ADX. "To build a service-oriented technology infrastructure to best support our clients, we selected Oracle Fusion Middleware's SOA technologies, which allow for interoperability with our clients regardless of their business system or technology platform."

Cattles plc, one of the largest providers of financial services products to the non-standard consumer credit market in the United Kingdom, chose to work with Oracle partner Griffiths Waite (GW) to build an adaptive application processing platform to support their expansion into new markets, as well as an ambitious partner program. GW evaluated various SOA offerings and selected Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle BAM, key components of the Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Cattles has the flexibility to easily change business processes as partner requirements change. Oracle BAM provides Cattles with immediate visibility into the application pipeline enabling them to monitor, manage and change their business -- in real time. This platform is successfully supporting an initial implementation of more than 2,000 users and processing upward of 25,000 applications per day. GW specializes in the design, development and management of business solutions based upon Oracle technology.

"The Oracle SOA Suite is by far the most comprehensive and integrated SOA offering in the marketplace," said Mark Simpson, architect at Griffiths Waite. "Cattles needed a solution that could not only orchestrate high-risk loan approval process, but could also provide the ability to monitor the key business metrics. Together, Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle BAM helped us create a robust platform, enabling Cattles to easily monitor processes and provide a feedback loop for process optimization."

Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Police is responsible for the maintenance and development of the basic guarantees of the rule of law throughout Norway. Established in 1818, the organization has approximately 17,700 employees across its three major subsidiaries -- the Police Directorate, the Prison and Probation Service and the Legislation Department. The organization selected Oracle SOA Suite to develop an IT architecture that would integrate its disparate applications and data.

"We chose the Oracle SOA Suite to serve as the foundation for our new architecture. All solutions developed within the Justice Sector will be based upon this architecture, and the software that is acquired will be of central value in prospective projects of development for the National Police Computing and Material Service," said Peter Hafskjold, technical project manager of National Police Computing and Material Service. "This is the first big SOA project within the public sector in Norway. With SOA principles, now the IT systems of the Norwegian Police, the Norwegian Courts and the Norwegian Correctional services will be connected in a most efficient way. All the central police solutions including, criminal records, private prosecution treatment, advertisement of loss and systems pertaining to center of operations and shift scheduling will be integrated."