At Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2005 Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy at database giant Oracle, explains the challenges and trends in supporting enterprise computing, and what Oracle can do to help businesses using open source software and PHP solutions.

While Oracle deals with challenges relating to scale, the enterprise demands solutions for performance and security as well. A major new paradigm within Oracle's business is looking at transforming large groups of independent and isolated hardware, which are usually in separate domains and separately managed, into an environment which is built for applications which interoperate and can be managed from the back end.

Jacobs presents Oracle's goal of encouraging standardization by way of fewer software versions, fewer databases and fewer vendors in an effort to consolidate and increase sharing between existing systems. This new service-oriented architecture, pioneered mainly by providing computer resources on demand, aims at making modular composite applications a feasible alternative to expansive closed systems in use today.

Jacobs invites CTOs from StepUp Commerce and Amici LLC onto the stage to detail their implementations of Oracle technology in deploying PHP front end solutions in combination with an Oracle database back end. Jacobs finishes his presentation with a quick demonstration of implementing PHP solutions together with Oracle's latest offerings.