The University of Adelaide hearts Oracle

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blog We never picked software vendor Oracle as a particularly *cuddly* sort of company, but according to a statement we received yesterday from the company, it’s been getting all cosy and comfy with the University of Adelaide.

According to Oracle’s statement, the university has recently deployed a slew of Oracle products, including company’s SOA Suite 11g, WebLogic Server 11g, Fusion Middleware 11g, Service Bus 11g, BPEL Process Manager, and Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data-Grid, and it’s also planning to install Oracle’s Business Process Management Suite 11g.

Whoah. Now if that wasn’t a mouthful, we don’t know what is.

It looks as if most of the solutions which have been deployed are designed to underpin the student and staff portals at the university (PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions, and PeopleSoft Human Resources are also being used here) and tie together a wide range of associated applications. Says Jonathan Churchill, Associate Director of Technology, University of Adelaide:

“When we started on this journey, we had the vision but not the technology. Since implementing Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, we have been able to orchestrate and deliver business services that make sense to the users (like students and staff), not just the providers (the IT team). Ultimately it is the user buy-in, which has been very positive, that reaffirms we are well on our way to transforming and achieving our education and technology vision.”

Universities typically run quite complex, heterogenuous and constantly changing environments, and increasingly provide access to many of their applications through centralised portals; it looks very much like Oracle’s apps have been the tasty butter in the University of Adelaide’s complex systems sandwich.

Universities are also (along with banks) one of the few places we still hear the term ‘service-oriented architecture’ being thrown about in Australia’s IT sector these days. It seems SOA — so cool just a few years ago — is now out of vogue generally, having been supplanted off its hype-throne by the ubiquitous ‘cloud’. Can’t there be some form of mashup? A service-oriented cloud (SOC)? Or a cloud-oriented architecture (COS)? We think they should just be friends ;)

Image credit: Yello-Dog, royalty-free