Oracle acquires Collaxa, jumping on bandwagon

Oracle Corp. has acquired Collaxa, a four-year-old start-up company based in Redwood Shores, Calif. The reason? Collaxa's BPEL Server technology, which supports the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) specification. Jointly developed by vendors—including SAP, IBM, Siebel, and BEA Systems—BPEL allows companies to turn business processes into 'services' that then can be reused by other applications.

Now renamed the BPEL Process Manager, Oracle has been pushing the product strongly, most recently at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in July. The move, however, has raised eyebrows. For one, it suggests that Oracle is moving to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) more fully—and more quickly—than previously had been thought.

Not at all, says Rob Cheng, product director, Oracle Application Server and Tools. Oracle hasn't frowned on the SOA, he claims, but instead has believed that the architecture could not work with a single vendor's products. "True interoperability calls for services to work with any vendors' products—and that's what we've been working to achieve," he says.