For the week of September 15th, 2012:
- Oracle Support for HP Itanium Temporarily Extended
- More Critical Bugs Found in Java 7
- Java EE 7 Not Going to Be Cloud-Ready for Near Future
- Taleo Brings Shiny Glam to Oracle Fusion HCM
“IOUG Podcast 15-SEP-2012 Itanium’s Back / Java 7 Cloudy Bugs / Fusion HCM Taleo Talent”
Subscribe to this Podcast (RSS) or iTunes
Oracle Support for HP Itanium Temporarily Extended
Being a slower than usual newsweek for Oracle-related technology (all building up to OpenWorld at month’s end), we did find a few worthy stories to disperse this week, among the numerous stories about Oracle’s legal battles courtesy of Dennis Brian Moore’s ever-diligent digging.
Doug Henschen’s article in InformationWeek says that Oracle announced on Tuesday that it will comply with a court ruling handed down last month telling the company to continue to port the latest versions of its database and application software to run on Hewlett-Packard Itanium servers. The Court backed HP’s claims that a 2010 contract with Oracle explicitly said that mutual product support must continue as it had in the past. Oracle last year announced that Oracle Database 12c, due out in early 2013, would not be available on Itanium, but in Tuesday’s statement, the company reversed itself. “A judge recently ruled that Oracle has a contract to continue porting its software to Itanium computers for as long as HP sells Itanium computers. Therefore, Oracle will continue building the latest versions of its database and other software covered by the judge’s ruling to HP Itanium computers,”
More Critical Bugs in Java 7
Lucian Constantin of IDG News reports this week that security researchers from Poland-based security firm Security Explorations claim to have discovered a vulnerability in the Java 7 security update released Thursday that can be exploited to escape the Java sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the underlying system. Oracle broke out of its regular four-month patching cycle on Thursday to release Java 7 Update 7, an emergency security update that addressed three vulnerabilities, including two that were being exploited by attackers to infect computers with malware since last week. Based on the experience of Security Explorations researchers with hunting for Java vulnerabilities so far, Java 6 has better security than Java 7. “Java 7 was surprisingly much easier for us to break,” says company CEO, Adam Gowdiak. ”For Java 6, we didn’t manage to achieve a full sandbox compromise, except for the issue discovered in Apple Quicktime for Java software.
Java EE 7 Not Going to Be Cloud-Ready for Near Future
Leaders of the effort to develop Java EE 7 – the next version of Oracle’s Java platform for enterprise computing – have recommended that certain planned components be deferred to a later version in the interest of keeping the project on schedule. Linda DeMichiel, the specification lead for Java EE 7, wrote in a blog post that providing solid support for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and multi-tenancy would likely delay the project for another year. We have therefore proposed to the Java EE 7 Expert Group that we adjust our course of action — namely, stick to our current target release dates, and defer the remaining aspects of our agenda for PaaS enablement and multi-tenancy support to Java EE 8.”
Cloud vendors are already working on ways to support enterprise Java apps on their platforms. Many have chosen to support Spring, a lighter-weight framework, rather than Java EE. Several vendors – including CloudBees and Red Hat – already provide support for at least portions of the current Java EE spec in their cloud environments, and as these vendors gain more experience in this area, they may be able to help the Java EE 8 effort avoid premature standardization of its remaining cloudy components.
Taleo Brings Shiny Glam to Oracle Fusion HCM
On the Fusion Applications front, Oracle’s continued evolution of its Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) portfolio is now fully-extended in the areas that were least-addressed within the base product through integration of the Taleo technology products acquired earlier in 2012. New additions to the HCM Cloud Services product line include Analytics, Learning Management, Onboarding Process tracking, and Recruiting Portals. The product line further diversifies by dividing itself into a larger enterprise and small- to medium-sized business (SMB) categories through the Taleo Business Edition (TBE) products designed for organizations with fewer than 3,000 employees. By extending the HCM featureset into much-needed analytics and career management areas, Oracle hopes to finally woo the existing PeopleSoft and e-Business Suite HR customers towards its highly functional Fusion HCM cloud offering as a lower cost plus higher functionality application set with virtually transparent migration paths as a featureset for remaining with the Oracle suite of HCM products.