By Dawn Kawamoto
Tuesday, November 13 2007 11:06 AM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034338,00.htm

Oracle president Charles Phillips played tour guide this week, pointing out virtualization and the company's application integration architecture (AIA) as two key areas to watch for this year as the software giant moves forward in building its "stack".

Phillips, during his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld on Monday, noted those are some areas where Oracle will be making its more significant announcements in the coming year.

The company, for example, unveiled its Oracle VM on Monday, as well as introduced its AIA Foundation Pack.

"Virtualization is hot," Phillips said during his keynote. "Oracle VM is essentially our version of virtualization. We give you a single environment for managing virtualization and the Linux operating system."

Oracle VM is open-source server virtualization software, which is designed to support Oracle and third-party applications. Oracle VM aims to offer a graphical interface for creating and managing groups of virtual servers running off of x86 and x86-64 based systems.

But while Oracle's v12n is based on the open source Xen project, it costs extra. Novell and Red Hat, for example, don't carry an extra fee for Xen.

Oracle also unveiled its AIA Foundation Pack. Oracle's AIA aims to act as a platform for integrating Oracle and third-party applications on an open platform on Oracle's middleware stack, Phillips said.

"We're building an open platform on our middleware stack and then providing a package to integrate between our products," said Phillips.

Other areas where the company will be having key announcements in the coming months include its closely watched Fusion Middleware, 11g, which is currently in beta. He also pointed to its Enterprise Manager 11g, which is in beta too.

This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.com.