17 May 2006

Confluence, Oblix, Oracle Ummmm

I stumbled across this interesting article by Sekhar Sarukkai & David Cohen on Web services and the forgotten OSI Layer Six (of a company called Confluence posted in Spetember 2003). I quite liked the idea of describing managaement in terms of the OSI layers, and linking network managament at the lower layers with application management at the higher layers. In fact, although we do this in the TSSG, I had rarely seen a big picture statement like this putting things in context.... I went to read the whitepapers from the company, only to discover that they had been acquired by Oblix in 2004, and then Oblix had subsequently acquired by Oracle in 2005. Pity I didn't spot that article in 2003, I might have been onto something :-) So, now the technology has been integrated into Oracle's identity server (COREid), as described neatly by Pamela Dingle in Oracle COREid Tidbits:

Oracle’s Identity suite is very exciting! The products that are part of this suite (at least the ones that interest me) are:

  • Xellerate - aquired from Thor
  • COREid - aquired from Oblix
  • OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) - aquired from Oblix who aquired it through Confluence (iirc)
  • Virtual Directory - aquired from OctetString

The good news it that this is a spectacular set of functionality. The bad news is that you will NEVER FIND what you need on their godawful website. So - here is my “frequently wished for but rarely found” list:

....

For some wacky reason, the COREid stuff is considered to be logically part of the Oracle Application Server. I know, that makes no sense, since the core service does not run in a container, and it is perfectly possible to run COREid and never have anything to do with the Application Server. Still, for browsing purposes, this information is CRITICAL.

Posted by mofoghlu at May 17, 2006 3:18 PM
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