Oracle also announced the general availability of Oracle Application Management Packs for the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's Siebel CRM. With these new capabilities, customers can manage their applications and underlying infrastructure to help improve application availability and business transaction performance with a single, integrated management solution.

"Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 3 brings a top-down management approach to application management -- whether Oracle or non-Oracle systems -- and from the application layer through the operating system," said Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of Systems Management Products, Oracle. "This unique, business-focused approach provides our customers with a complete, integrated way to manage performance and availability, service levels, configurations, and deployment lifecycle for custom or pre-packaged applications and infrastructure. With these new capabilities, customers will be able to deliver better quality of service at lower cost."

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g features new, advanced Oracle Fusion Middleware management capabilities for the services that business applications rely upon including SOA, Business Activity Monitoring and Identity Management. Users can automatically discover and monitor processes orchestrated through Oracle BPEL Process Manager, and track evolution of process definitions of the BPEL processes and the associated services thereby reducing the effort for these time-consuming tasks and simplifying change tracking.

Oracle Enterprise Manager's integration with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring helps IT administrators to monitor key business performance indicators and proactively remediate business activity issues that stem from availability and performance of IT systems. Bi-directional data exchange between Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Business Activity Monitoring enables business key performance indicators (KPIs) and alerts to be visible from within Oracle Enterprise Manager's management console and system information to be visible from the Oracle Business Activity Monitoring dashboard. This integration and increased data sharing between the two systems allows users to measure service level agreements against business metrics in real-time.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 3 also features increased support for Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager through the Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management. Introduced earlier this year, the Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management enables organizations to reduce the cost and complexity of managing identity and access management systems.

The new release further simplifies patch management with synchronized patching, additional operating system support and conflict detection features. Administrators now have the ability to orchestrate patching across high availability environments including those using Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Database and Oracle Cluster Ready Services. Additionally, administrators can apply patches to Oracle Real Application Clusters and distributed middle-tier environments in a rolling fashion to eliminate the disruption of service and allow end-users to remain connected to production systems during the patch process.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 3 is generally available on Linux and Windows platforms. A free evaluation copy of the software is available for download at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/index.html

The Oracle Management Pack for SOA is priced at $10,000 per CPU or $200 per Named User Plus. The Oracle Management Pack for SOA is compatible with Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.3 or higher. The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and the Oracle Application Management Pack for Siebel are priced at $6,000 per CPU or $120 per Named User Plus.