The suites are made up of Oracle’s existing product line and the technologies from its acquisition of BEA earlier this year, according to a brief report on the state of the current Oracle middleware offering, Oracle OpenWorld’s Middleware Message Is ‘Watch This Space,’ published earlier this month.

The Gartner analysts note that little was said about middleware in the announcements at Oracle Open World last month other than the announced plan to put Fusion in the Amazon cloud. The roadmap announced this past July for the full integration of the BEA products into Oracle’s middleware will not come until sometime in 2009, Gartner predicts.

Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g, due in the next six to 12 months.

That release ”will begin to implement the announced road map, and platform modernizations, such as support of OSGi Alliance technology and Service Component Architecture, expanded hot-pluggability, and the extensive use of Oracle Coherence XTP-distributed cache,” the report states.

The limits are in its applicability in applications, which may benefit from grid technology, but may not require extreme processing, says Mike Piech, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Speaking to SOATalk about Oracle’s new Application Grid product initiative integrating the Tuxedo transaction monitor (acquired along with BEA) with other in-memory data grid offerings, Piech said he isn’t pushing the XTP message because it might turn-off potential customers.

“In hanging too much on XTP there’s a potential for it [Application Grid] to be perceived as too narrow,” he explained. “There’s a potential for a customer to say: ‘My application isn’t necessarily extreme or it’s not transaction processing per se.’ The danger we felt was that driving too much from just XTP emphasizes the wrong things and sends the wrong message.”

This doesn’t mean that Oracle, one of the pioneers in XTP, is turning away from the technology.

“You’ll still hear us talking XTP where it makes sense and in context where customers see themselves as doing XTP and are looking for technologies that address XTP specific needs, Piech said. “But I would characterize the Application Grid story as more general than that.”

He noted that organization can benefit from the Application Grid technology even if they are not operating at levels that people might consider extreme.

IBM is taking a different approach to this issue having coined the term Business Event Processing (BEP) as explained this week in IBM WebSphere grows to include better Business Event Processing by Jack Vaughan.

“We’ve implemented Oracle Coherence for the shopping basket in our online site,” said Leith Painter, manager of development at AbeBooks.com. “We wanted to persist key information in memory for our buyers in purchasing books without having to read/write from the database.”

XTP is highly touted for the financial services industry where it can, for example, help prevent cyber theft by sorting through massive transaction data streams and flagging exceptions that may indicate crimes such as credit card fraud, said David Chappell, Oracle’s chief technologist for SOA, in a Q&A interview.

XTP, and complex event processing (CEP) are potentially killer apps for SOA.

John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology, predicted in a SearchSOA interview that CEP could create “a new physics of computing” Where older approaches to business intelligence applications focused on hourly, daily or even weekly reports and analysis, CEP has the power to show business managers what is happening now. That’s the “new physics” Bates envisions.

Among the big vendors, IBM WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo sees CEP becoming the next big thing SOA. In an interview with SearchSOA, Cuomo envisions applications beyond transaction processing including shipping companies using CEP to monitor RFID and GPS data to track individual packages traveling on a truck.

From the analyst perspective the emphasis on events is a natural progression for SOA.

SOA is all about events, as Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, has been telling us for some time. “Our perspective is that SOA should fundamentally be event-driven,” he said when interviewed for an article on event-processing.

Bloomberg went on to say: “In SOA, services communicate by sending and/or receiving messages, and messages are essentially software events. That is how the system reflects a business event. So in a fully realized SOA implementation, the traffic you’d expect to see on the network will consist of services and service consumers madly exchanging messages — or in other words, large numbers of events in what you might call an event cloud.”