HP Extends Service-oriented Architecture Portfolio by Embracing Oracle Fusion Middleware.

PALO ALTO, Calif. & REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) and Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL) today announced the next phase of their joint activities to help enterprises align IT resources and investments with business strategies.

To offer customers more agile software that helps automate business processes, HP plans to incorporate Oracle Fusion Middleware into the HP Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) portfolio. SOA is an architectural approach to building software applications as a collection of autonomous, re-usable business services.

Using Oracle's software and the HP OpenView management software suite, HP plans to develop and deliver SOA-based business services that help customers automate business processes and integrate disparate data and applications, while leveraging existing applications.

HP Services' SOA offerings include a complete lifecycle methodology, risk-managed start-up, proof-of-concept, and comprehensive solution integration capabilities. This builds on HP's existing ability to resell Oracle Fusion Middleware. Additionally, HP and Oracle are planning joint go-to-market activities that enable customers worldwide to transform their business processes with SOAs.

"Companies can preserve legacy systems by using them as business assets without the requirement for replacement or business-crippling developing lifecycles," said Uday Kumaraswami, vice president, Enterprise Application Services Practice, HP Services. "With these HP and Oracle offerings, companies can develop new business capabilities at a lower cost and capitalize on the need to respond to change."

Today's announcement furthers HP and Oracle's Optimize for Agility initiative, launched in October 2005, by enabling the companies' joint engineering team to expand the initial Oracle grid reference architecture.

"Organizations can plug Oracle's best-in-class middleware components into their existing IT systems to create flexible and automated computing environments," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. "HP's adoption and support of Oracle Fusion Middleware and its SOA components are a testament to the market momentum we've experienced, and we are confident that our HP relationship will build on this momentum."

HP -- A leader in SOA

HP is investing in SOA as one of five strategic areas for creating a dynamic computing environment. To this end, HP has developed a rich portfolio of offerings to help companies optimize resources at the lowest cost, in the shortest time, with the best return. This approach to computing is core to the HP Adaptive Enterprise vision, in which business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change.

Since the launching of its SOA portfolio in June 2005, HP has worked with many customers to transform their IT environments using SOA-based products and services. HP has more than 6,500 services professionals capable of engineering SOA-based solutions. HP addresses customer needs at any point along the application lifecycle -- from helping customers understand SOA concepts and developing adoption roadmaps, to assessing, developing and deploying SOA-based solutions.

Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a comprehensive middleware product family composed of the company's industry-leading SOA and middleware products. It includes: Oracle Application Server 10g, related Oracle Application Server products and options such as Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Web Services Manager, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, Oracle COREid Products, Oracle Portal and Oracle Integration, Oracle Data Hubs, Oracle Content Services 10g, Oracle Real Time Collaboration 10g and Oracle Unified Messaging. This family of proven middleware products helps organizations achieve greater agility, make better-informed business decisions and more easily integrate data and processes across disparate IT systems -- including technologies from Oracle and other vendors.(1)

Oracle Fusion Middleware also provides customers with comprehensive lifecycle support for service-oriented applications and delivers unparalleled interoperability with enterprises' existing IT infrastructure due to its unique hot-pluggable architecture.

More information about Oracle Fusion Middleware is available at www.oracle.com/middleware.

About Oracle

Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. More information about Oracle can be found on the web at www.oracle.com.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $86.7 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

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(1) The above is intended to outline Oracle's general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

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