At Microsoft's Global Exchange (MGX) annual sales conference in Orlando last week, Microsoft gave preliminary information out about "Windows 7," its next desktop operating system. Microsoft said it can be expected in 2010, giving it about a three-year development period.

In this case, though, Microsoft might be working overtime to hit a release date more in line with the announced time frame. That's because there's a great deal of unhappiness in the business community over Software Assurance (SA), Microsoft's program of paying for software in smaller yearly installments, rather than a huge layout all at once when a new product ships. Microsoft's delays in both Windows Server 2008 and Vista may result in SA customers paying more than they would have if they had not joined the program.

Microsoft is so concerned about SA anger that it specifically addressed the issue in a statement to Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley, who writes a column for Redmond magazine. According to Foley, Microsoft stated, "As part of our ongoing outreach to enterprise customers and partners, Microsoft has begun sharing plans for how they will continue to deliver value to businesses in the future, including Software Assurance customers in particular."

At the same time, the company left itself some wiggle room in regards to its target release date. "Microsoft is scoping Windows '7' development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar," the statement said.

Microsoft also announced that Windows 7, formerly code-named "Vienna," will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and will have consumer and business versions, like Vista.

According to a slide deck Foley saw at the conference, Microsoft is considering how to make Windows 7 a subscription-based service as well as a standalone product. As Microsoft announced recently, it is offering more and more of its software "on-demand," similar to what Salesforce.com does with its customer relationship management software.

"Cisco's success is built on listening to our customers and partners and on understanding market transitions," said Cisco CEO John Chambers, in a statement. "Because the network is uniquely positioned to be the platform for the data center, we are investing in innovations to help our customers transform their data centers for improved efficiency and increased business productivity."

Cisco unveiled a number of new Data Center 3.0 deliverables, including VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that can use network intelligence to provision resources as virtualized services. The idea, Cisco says, is that customers can use VFrame DC to link their compute, networking and storage infrastructures together as virtualized services.

Elsewhere, Cisco announced a new Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release that boasts highly secure wide area network (WAN) acceleration and application performance management capabilities. The revamped WAAS provides tight integration with NetQoS application monitoring products, officials said. Cisco also unveiled an enhanced version of its Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) XML Gateway software. The revamped Cisco ACE XML boasts improved support for secure Web services, along with enhanced management, visibility, and performance for XML applications and Web 2.0 services.

Other deliverables include the Cisco MDS 18/4 Multiservice Module, which provides eighteen 4-Gbps Fibre Channel ports and four Gigabit Ethernet IP storage services ports. It supports virtual SANs (VSANs), inter-VSAN routing (IVR), remote SAN extension with high-performance Fibre Channel over IP, integrated Cisco Multilayer Datacenter Switch (MDS) Storage Media Encryption (SME) as a distributed fabric service, advanced Fiber Connectivity (FICON) services, cost-effective Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) connectivity to Ethernet-attached servers, and other capabilities designed to optimize WAN resources for backup and replication.

There's also the Cisco MDS 9134 Multilayer Fabric Switch, which Cisco says is designed for midrange to large enterprise customers. It provides line-rate 4-Gbps and 10-Gbps ports in a compact one-rack-unit (1RU) chassis, is expandable from 24 to 32 ports (and includes two optional 10 GigE ports), and supports VSANs, PortChannels, quality of service (QoS), FICON protocol integration, and security for cost-effective departmental and enterprise SANs.

The latest version of the FairUse4M program, which can crack Microsoft's digital rights management system for Windows Media audio and video files, was published online late Friday. In the past year, Microsoft plugged holes exploited by two earlier versions of the program and filed a federal lawsuit against its anonymous authors. Microsoft dropped the lawsuit after failing to identify them.

"We knew at the start that no digital rights management technology is going to be impervious to circumvention," said Jonathan Usher, a director in Microsoft's consumer media technology group, in a phone interview.

Usher said Microsoft employs a full-time team to combat such breaches, and that the Windows Media DRM system was designed to be quickly modified to shut down this type of attack.

He did not say how many songs have been stripped of copy protection, or how long it will take for Microsoft to combat the hack again. But the music industry is aware of the nature of Microsoft's technology, he said, and added that he does not expect record labels to lose patience with the process.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group, declined to comment.

While Usher said Microsoft will remain committed to copy protection, attitudes around the industry are starting to shift.

Apple Inc. has modified its own online store, iTunes, to block similar efforts to break its FairPlay copy protection scheme. But Apple's chief, Steve Jobs, started calling for an end to digital music-locking earlier this year.

"There are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music," Jobs wrote in an online essay in February. "They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game."

Apple's iTunes store started selling DRM-free music from EMI Group PLC's catalog in May. The same month, Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. said its much-anticipated digital music store will sell tracks in the unprotected MP3 format.

Josh Bernoff, an industry analyst at Forrester Research, said he expects music DRM to fade out in the next couple of years as record companies begin to realize selling unprotected tracks online won't hurt sales. After all, Bernoff said, the same tracks are already circulating unprotected, copied from CDs and on file-sharing networks.

Word (from various sources who asked not to be named) is Microsoft is gearing up to drop Vista SP1 some time the week of July 16. And despite what Microsoft seemingly led Google, the U.S. Department of Justice and other company watchers to believe, the final version of Vista SP1 is sounding like November 2007.

(November 2007 is also the release-to-manufacturing target for Windows Server 2008, sources say. Microsoft won't provide an RTM date for Windows Server 2008, other than to say it is still on track to RTM before the end of 2007.)

If Vista SP1 is released in November, the Windows client team will be sticking to a schedule company officials outlined a year ago, when the official plan of record was to release Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server) simultaneously.

Another observation: If Microsoft releases Vista SP1 in November, it will have been in beta for an unusually short four months. In the past, Microsoft Windows service packs could be in beta for a year or longer.

Microsoft officials have been wavering over what to say about SP1 for the past year. Throughout that time, a number of company execs wouldn't even admit they were planning to release a service pack for Vista at all.

Microsoft's Windows client team, under Director of Windows Engineering Steven Sinofsky, has adopted a much more restrictive information-flow policy. Instead of over-promising and under-delivering, Sinofsky wants the client team to do the opposite. To achieve this, the client team is attempting to institute Apple-like secrecy over anything pertaining to future Windows client directions.

There was a tiny chink in the Windows organization's armor in June, when Microsoft agreed to Google's demand that it alter its desktop-search functionality, seemingly to head off another potential antitrust suit. In late June, the Redmondians said they'd have a Beta 1 version of SP1 (which would include alterations to Vista's search) before the end of calendar 2007. They declined to provide a date for the final Vista SP1 release.

History aside, what's on tap to be part of Vista SP1?

Microsoft is expected to emphasize that SP1 is more about fixes than new features. Most of the elements of SP1 are expected to enhance or supplment features that are already part of Vista, sources said.

In addition to desktop-search modifications, here's a list of other fixes likely to make it in:

* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines (Yeah, I know Microsoft said Viista shutdown speed wasn't an issue. Guess users weren't so crazy, after all.)
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
* Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

I asked Microsoft officials for a response on Vista SP1's timing and feature set. I did not hear back before posting this blog entry. (If and when I do get a response, I will add it here.)

There may be more in Vista SP1 than what's on this list. That's all I've heard so far. Anything you're hoping makes it in that's not listed here?

Source: ZDNet
Author: Mary Jo Foley

First spotted by a Spanish-speaking blogger identified as Kwisatz, the photograph showing three men is tucked into one of the holograms on the surface of Vista DVDs. But at just one millimetre in size, it's too small to see without magnification.

Conspiratorial tongues began wagging almost immediately. I got word from someone on the inside that they are running a query inside Microsoft, that emails are flying around trying to figure out who put the picture in there," wrote blogger Nathan Weinberg on InsideMicrosoft. "That pretty much means this wasn't known until now, this wasn't approved, and there's some level of concern internally."

Others, including Paul McNamara of Network World, figured it was an Easter egg, the term for hidden - and usually funny - bits tucked into software. Or people just wondered exactly what was going on. "There's a picture of three guys hidden on the Vista DVD. Who the hell are these people, and why are they on Vista?" asked blogger "otozh" on Windows Vista Videos.

"The fact that it took five months for this to get caught shows the problem: There could have been anything there," said Weinberg. "Whoever stuck in that photo could have stuck in [anything], and Microsoft will probably feel the need to go with overkill to prevent that ever happening."

Not according to Microsoft's Nick White in a posting to the Vista team's blog.

"Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed," said White. "The photo is only one of multiple images contained in the hologram design, all of whose inclusion serves to make it more difficult to replicate a Windows Vista DVD."

The three men in the photo, said White, are members of Microsoft's antipiracy team who worked on the Vista holograms. Other images on the disc - Kwisatz said he had found three others, but couldn't make out details - are art masterpieces in the public domain, added White.

"These security measures were never intended to be impossible to find, but rather difficult to reproduce," said White.

Microsoft stepped up the DVD anti-duplication measures used for Vista and embedded numerous holograms in the plastic. "While it's extremely difficult to replicate a holographic design in general, the inclusion of original images makes it that much more so," White said.

There's one mystery still unsolved, however: White did not name the three tiny Microsoft employees.

But maybe the readers of Make magazine's blog can help there. "My money is on 3 horseman of the apocolypse [sic]. The fourth is a mac user," opined one.

"I'm pretty sure the guy on the left is [Microsoft platforms and services group president] Kevin Johnson, they're probably all Windows execs of some ilk," chimed in a second.

A third was sure he knew. "One of those guys is [Apple Inc. CEO] Steve Jobs."

On Sunday, Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes confirmed the charge. "Microsoft's current approach with Vista desktop search violates its agreement with the government and hurts consumers." he said in an e-mail to Computerworld. "The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft's own desktop search product, with no way for users to choose an alternate provider from these visible search access points. Likewise, Vista makes it impractical to turn off Microsoft's search index."

According to postings on Microsoft's support forums, the only way to completely disable Vista's search is to stop the Windows Search service in the Microsoft Management Console.

Microsoft disputed Google's charges. "We've been working with state and federal antitrust officials for the past two years to ensure that there are no problems with any of the features in Windows Vista," said company spokesman Jack Evans. "These desktop search issues were reviewed at length with regulators prior to the release of Windows Vista and resulted in more than a dozen changes at their request."

Even so, Microsoft will consider more changes to Vista, Evans added. "While we don't believe there are any compliance concerns with desktop search, we are committed to going the extra mile to resolve this issue, so long as the changes Google is requesting do nothing to undermine the privacy and security of computer users."

During a March 2007 hearing conducted by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the 2002 Microsoft consent decree, the government's status report noted that a complaint had been filed, but did not identify the company. "At the last status conference, plaintiffs reported that they had just received a middleware-related complaint," the status report read.

"Since then, plaintiffs have been investigating this complaint, including obtaining significant additional information from Microsoft and the complainant."

Google had previously raised concerns about search in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser with federal officials. In May 2006, however, federal officials rebuffed Google, saying that IE 7 users could easily switch search providers and that computer makers could set the default search engine in IE 7 before shipping systems. Google has also filed similar complaints over search in both IE 7 and Vista with the European Union's antitrust commission. Those complaints have not been settled.

According to The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice refused to pursue the Google complaint, and Thomas Barnett, the assistant U.S. attorney general for antitrust, sent a memo to numerous state attorneys general in May asking them to also reject the complaint. Prosecutors in several of those states, however, have reportedly decided to investigate the Google concerns whether the federal government goes along or not, a decision that has Barnett reconsidering the agency's position. E-mails and phone calls asking several of the states involved with the 2004 Microsoft settlement to comment were not returned Sunday.

Barnett's division will present its next report on Microsoft's progress in meeting the 2002 settlement to Kollar-Kotelly in a hearing scheduled for June 26.

SOURCE: Info World

In a 38-page white paper set for publication Wednesday and titled "Enhanced Network Performance with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008," the Tolly Group compares the networking performance for file access on WANs and LANs using various configurations of Windows Server 2003 R2 or 2008 on the backend and XP SP2 or Vista on the frontend.

Not surprisingly, the combination of the newest operating systems brings the best gains in network performance in large part, Tolly concludes, because of an upgraded TCP/IP stack and updates to the file-sharing Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

The report was commissioned by Microsoft, which raises questions about the value of the results, but the conclusions should at least provide some benchmarks for corporate users testing the software as part of their adoption evaluations.

Microsoft has been touting the networking benefits of its new operating systems on the client and server, and this study finally attaches numbers to those claims.

"We think the gains that we showed are considerable," says Kyle Sim, director of engineering for Tolly. "Because just by changing the OS on the client or server [or both], you can see performance enhancements of two to three times."

The Tolly study found that just by upgrading to Vista, users can see throughput gain of two to three times over XP and a reduction in time-to-completion (the time it takes to download a 10MB Office file over a simulated 10Mbps WAN) of 60 percent. The study shows that Vista in combination with Windows Server 2008 can yield gains of as much as 3.3 times in throughput and 3.5 times in time-to-completion over Windows Server 2003 and XP.

Tolly ran the tests over a variety of simulated LAN and WAN configurations taking into account bandwidth and latency The tests included sending SMB Copy and Open file commands, copying Roaming Profiles (including all elements on a user's desktop) and executing an Open file command on a SharePoint Services portal across the WAN and performing Office Open and Copy files commands across the LAN.

On the WAN side the connections ranged from satellite-type connections at 512KB per second with 300 milliseconds of latency to 10MB per second with 50-millisecond latency. On the LAN, the connections were 1000MB per second with 1-millisecond delay and 100MB per second with a 5-millisecond delay.

In one sample test, Windows Server 2003 R2 server was able to copy to an XP client a 10MB Office file at an average throughput of .9MB per second in 93.07 seconds using a simulated 2MB per second WAN link with 150 milliseconds of latency. In contrast, the Windows Server 2008/Vista combination had a throughput rate of 2MB per second and a completion time of 42.85 seconds, doubling throughput and cutting the download time by more than half.

"If you go back to the 3270 days with IBM, it recognized that users had large investments in applications, so they continued to fine-tune and wring performance out of those 3270 and VTAM-type applications," says Charlie Bruno, Tolly's executive editor of the white paper. "This is Microsoft's recognition that with these latest operating systems that they need to continue to give users greater performance to protect that large investment in applications they have out there."

Tolly found most of the performance gains could be linked to an upgrade in the TCP/IP stack called Receive Window Auto-Tuning and to support for SMB 2.0, a protocol for sharing files, printers, serial ports and communications between computers.

Receive Window Auto-Tuning automatically adjusts the size of the TCP window up to 16MB and monitors the network connection to optimize throughput.

"It will scale up and scale back dynamically; it won't saturate the network," says Jason Leznek, senior product manager for the Vista team at Microsoft. "I like to say we are using the network more efficiently."

The Receive Windows feature uses standard TCP extensions outlined in the IETF's RFC 1323 and works in conjunction with Compound TCP (CTCP) a new feature in the Microsoft TCP/IP stack, which adjusts the send windows to align with the size of the receive window. The CTCP function is enabled by default in Windows Server 2008.

The SMB 2.0 protocol improvements allow multiple actions in a single request, which reduces the number of round trips the client needs to make to the server.

Leznek says performance gains are greatest with SMB, but that HTTP gets a slight improvement, including the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) file transfer protocol that runs on top of HTTP.

"The secret sauce behind these tests is the enhancements we have done in the networking layer," said Ian Hameroff, a senior product manager for security and access at Microsoft. "The enhancements almost need to be treated as an 'Intel Inside' type of approach, because most people won't realize that their performance has improved because of networking functionality. They will assume that Internet Explorer is wired better or applications are running better because of some other aspect outside of raw TCP/IP improvements."

Source: John Fontana, Network World

Such tools should prove useful to coders who don't want to deal with complex, parallel code but do want to take advantage of performance gains delivered via products such as GPGPUs (general purpose GPUs) from Nvidia and AMD/ATI and even multi-core x86 processors. The PeakStream code looked to benefit the server world at large, making players such as Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and IBM the most likely purchasers of the start-up, founded in 2005.

Now it would seem Google wants to take all the performance gains for itself, perhaps by dabbling with GPGPUs or simply by tuning its in-house software to run well on multi-core chips. PeakStream enjoyed investments from venture capital firms Sequoia and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, as did Google. PeakStream's main rival RadpidMind must be feeling good with the multi-threaded code shift game all to itself.

The Google Apps collection now includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator, and the Start Page. A presentation app mimicking Microsoft's PowerPoint is not available yet and is expected this summer.

Google Apps Partner Edition, like Google Apps for Your Domain, offers ISPs and service providers a low-cost alternative to developing and maintaining their own services to subscribers. Using Google's apps require minimal setup costs and low overhead and would relieve the ISP from having to maintain its own e-mail servers—Google will do it for them. Companies are even able to make Google's services look however they please by branding them with their own company logos and information.

Google Apps for Your Domain has been free to businesses in the past, but the company has said that it eventually plans to charge "a few dollars per month" for its use. Service partners, however, may be required to pay for the services right away. "We designed Google Apps Partner Edition to meet the specific needs of service providers—affordably," writes the company on the Partner Edition web page. Although Google does not specify how much it plans to charge service providers, the fees are likely to be based on a scale of subscriber numbers.

Clicking on the link brought up a page titled "Windows Server Code Name 'Longhorn' Beta 3 Reviewer's Guide"; it made no reference to Windows Server 2008.

Someone at Microsoft eventually noticed the slip; by 5:52 p.m. ET Thursday, the link was gone.

Microsoft, through its public relations company, remained mute: "Microsoft makes it a practice to not comment on rumors or speculation," was its response.

Longhorn went into beta 3 on April 24 and is expected to be released to manufacturing in the second half of 2007. That would put it on target for a commercial release very late this year or early in 2008. With the release of beta 3, Microsoft announced Longhorn as feature complete.

Microsoft for years has followed a standard convention of naming server operating systems by their year of release, starting with Windows 2000 Server.

Beta 3 is the first public release of the OS, downloadable at http://www.microsoft.com/getbeta3. Ward Ralston, a senior technical product manager in the Windows Server group, said, "We're very excited and proud that we're able to deliver the beta 3 milestone on time and with features we've promised our customers. And we've introduced new features that weren't on the radar in beta 2."

Those features include Windows PowerShell, additional Server Core roles and Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

Windows PowerShell is the new command-line shell that allows, essentially, all tasks to be scripted. It's a feature that many administrators have clamored for over the years, the kind of functionality that's always been available on high-end, scalable OSes like Unix.

Beta 3 also has four additional "Server Core" roles, in addition to the four roles found in earlier Longhorn versions. Server Cores are stripped-down versions of servers that are task-specific, and therefore less resource-intensive than full versions. Some of the new cores include a print server, streaming media server and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services.

Server Cores will be set up through the new Server Manager, which Ralston called "our one-stop shop for server configuration. With Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003, there were a lot of opportunities for IT pros to make mistakes." Server Manager aims to cut down on those mistakes, Ralston said.

Although Windows Firewall with Advanced Security isn't new in beta 3, the fact that it's turned on by default is. It's a feature that further enhances Microsoft's commitment to security, Ralston said.

"We've had thousands of servers [running Longhorn Server], both internally and through our technology adoption program, and have been monitoring them closely. Security's held up very well. With Longhorn, shields are always up until [administrators] decide which role they want a server to perform," he said.

Ralston said it's part of a paradigm shift for how Microsoft views security: "You don't lock a server down -- you unlock a server by deciding on what role you want."

With the release of Longhorn beta 3, Ralston said Longhorn Server is feature-complete. Microsoft has maintained that Longhorn -- likely to be dubbed "Windows Server 2008" upon commercial availability -- continues to be on schedule for release to manufacturing (RTM) in the "second half of 2007." No more precise dates were given for RTM, but Ralston said that at least one Release Candidate (RC) will be forthcoming following the beta period.

"As they take it for a test drive, our customers and partners will find we made some vast improvements in Windows Server 'Longhorn' to help them reduce costs and adapt to changing business needs," said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft, in a press release. "Between early adopter customers and Microsoft IT, we have hundreds of servers running in production environments today. If there's one message we want to send today, it is 'get ready, download and evaluate.'"

Longhorn also ushers in the end of an era for Microsoft: Ralston confirmed that it's the last 32-bit OS the company will produce. Much like Microsoft Exchange 2007, future releases will be 64-bit or higher. Asked if Microsoft is worried about future OSes not being able to run on legacy systems, Ralston was confident in the company's strategy, stating that companies like Dell and HP are not making 32-bit servers anymore.

That's a bit of hyperbole, as server manufacturers continue to offer 32-bit hardware for current server OSes, but the move toward 64-bit power in the future should continue to trend upward.

Helene Love Snell, a senior product manager in the Windows Server Group, said that Microsoft's own internal testing -- and through testing partners -- shows that Longhorn is ready for primetime.

"We've got close to 1,000 servers running in a production environment," she said. "It's a really good testament to the quality of the beta."

Although that may be true, public betas tend to uncover many more bugs than private betas, since the test bed is expanded exponentially. So Microsoft's pronouncements of Longhorn beta 3's stability might be true in its closed test environment, but could prove substantially less so in the myriad environments into which it's about to be thrust. Bug reports are sure to be just around the corner.

......
Though you may think of us as simply a company with a big search index, Google uses MySQL, the open source relational database, in some of the applications that we build that are not search related.

We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage solution, and as our projects push the requirements for the database in certain areas, we've made changes to enhance MySQL itself, mainly in the areas of high availability and manageability.

We would love for the some of these changes to be merged with the official MySQL release, but until then we felt strongly that anyone should have access to them, thus we have released the changes with a GPL license for the MySQL community to use and review.

What have we added and enhanced?

The high availability features include support for semi-synchronous replication, mirroring the binlog from a master to a slave, quickly promoting a slave to a master during failover, and keeping InnoDB and replication state on a slave consistent during crash recovery.

The manageability features include new SQL statements for monitoring resource usage by table and account. This includes the ability to count the number of rows fetched or changed per account or per table. It also includes the number of seconds of database time an account uses to execute SQL commands.

The integration of Stellent positions Oracle to better compete with current content management leaders, such as EMC, IBM and Open Text.

The ECM business has seen a burst of consolidation in just the last year. For instance, IBM's acquisition of FileNet and Open Text's acquisition of Hummingbird were finalized in October of 2006.

Microsoft offers ECM solutions through its SharePoint Server 2007 product line. Oracle used a Microsoft application for ECM in the past. However, with the Stellent acquisition, Oracle now will be able to compete with Microsoft SharePoint, in addition to IBM and Open Text, according to Kenneth Chin, research vice president at analyst firm Gartner.

Chin described the ECM market has having 11 percent growth in terms of software licensing and maintenance revenue. But the recent acquisitions also signal that the market is in its final stages of consolidation, he remarked.

"To be competitive in the ECM market, you really need to own a software stack," Chin explained. "Basically, you have to build up the stack and build out the application side, and Oracle is adding a lot of content management capabilities with the Stellent acquisition."

The Stellent integration effort was also facilitated by Stellent's use of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"One of the reasons we've been able to integrate Stellent is because they used an SOA," said Greg Crider, Oracle's senior director of product marketing. He added that product architecture has a major impact on customers and developers and that SOA is key for the multiple management of silos.

"An SOA solution makes it easy to address business processes," Crider said. "Our focus is making it easier for customers to create value-added solutions using a SOA approach," he added.

Chin said that SOA is becoming more mainstream from a product development standpoint. However, it may still require some customization to link together applications from different products or vendors.

Oracle uses the term "hot-pluggable" to refer to the SOA aspect of its ECM solution. Crider said that Oracle's ECM provides the ability for customers to leverage their IT systems and can support third-party solutions (such as IBM's application server).

Oracle's content management solutions will be released over the next 12 months and will include the following five products: Universal Content Management, Universal Records Management, Information Rights Management, Imaging and Process Management, and Content Database Suite.

More than 6,000 customers currently use Oracle's content management solutions and more than 31,000 customers currently use Oracle Fusion Middleware, according to Oracle's announcement.