Today is the day we officially launch Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Fusion Middleware 11gR1 is the result of a herculean effort that is 3+ years in the making.

The major areas of investment have been:

• The completion of the integration between Oracle and BEA products into unified suites.  This matches to the month the schedule that we had committed to publicly when announcing the BEA Strategy last June.  This continues our excellent track record of buying best-of-breed software and integrating it together into a common environment.
• Improving the efficiency of modern data centers by extending the capabilities of Application Grids.  We now take advantage of new hardware and software advancements such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, 10GB Ethernet systems, and virtualization to allow large sets of compute capacity and memory to be pooled together into virtualized grids or "clouds" that are lower cost, easier to manage with more flexible capacity to respond to business needs.
• Providing new Identity Management and Security technology to consolidate how users, their identities, and entitlements are managed, audited, and controlled to lower costs and improve security on Application Grids.
• A unified and declarative toolset with which Business Users and developers can work together to develop Business Applications & capture the behavior of the applications in metadata.
• A unified Business Process Platform with which to orchestrate humans, applications, and information into processes that can be monitored and optimized in real time, and providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the Enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools

Even though we are integrated into a set of suites, we are also still committed to being hot-pluggable with other technologies.  We continue to support multivendor environments, and have extended our open standards support with better support for WS-*; SCA, New Identity Management standards; WSRP 2.0 Support; BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL4People to name a few.  In addition we expand our definition of hot-pluggable to now exploit new IT infrastructure trends that are mainstreaming by integrating FMW with these new technologies. For example we have created a new facility to build and deploy virtual appliances allowing organization to exploit Virtualization more effectively.
For more information, go here.