With the history of Oracle integration products as a backdrop, it is interesting to note how Oracle Applications, and later Oracle E-Business Suite and the Oracle-acquired application package portfolio, have evolved in their approach to application integration.
Oracle Financials first entered the market in 1998 as the first of a new generation of packaged applications using open standards — character-mode user interfaces deployed on the Oracle relational database supported by Unix operating systems. The first modules, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Purchasing and Fixed Assets, had no integration features in the early releases, aside from tight integration among them, at the database level. Over time, customers demanded integration capabilities in Oracle Financials, Manufacturing and Human Resources, and an architecture evolved called Open Interfaces. Initially, the Open Interface architecture involved staging tables...