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By Michael Hickins
Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison announced that Oracle's new Fusion application set will be available "sometime in 2010."
The application set is an integrated offering incorporating the Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as software assets acquired from PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards, and includes advanced reporting capabilities for line-of-business managers and uses user-friendly Web-based interfaces.
During his keynote address at Oracle's OpenWorld user conference, Ellison also demonstrated key features of a forthcoming enterprise applications dashboard, which gives administrators a single portal for managing applications. This will be especially useful for former Seibel, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers who have been waiting for Oracle to come through on its longstanding promise to give them a simple way to manage the disparate applications.
The dashboard spans applications, middleware, database and virtual infrastructures from both Oracle and non-Oracle software.
Ellison also introduced My Oracle Support, an online customer support system using features of Web 2.0 and collaboration technology to give customers a broadest-possible range of support.
This integration aids customers with patch management by providing proactive patch recommendations and patch automation, and help them ensure their systems are continuously up-to-date. The portal-like support system also provides increased visibility into production environments, helping administrators prove they are meeting regulatory, compliance and governance requirements.
The Web support portal provides customers with real-time access to the latest support information and product alerts from Oracle, as well as independent forums and communities.
The following product suites are included in the upcoming Fusion integration:
- Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management
- Oracle Fusion Enterprise Project Portfolio Management
- Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, And Compliance
- Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management
- Oracle Fusion Financial Management
- Oracle Fusion Procurement
- Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management
The Fusion applications suite is designed using a services oriented architecture (SOA), allowing administrators to tie the various systems together without requiring additional extra middleware.
The application also includes role-based design, allowing administrators to provision users with appropriate modules and set permissions according to their roles.
The Fusion application suite will be available either on-premise or on-demand; this detail has been seized upon by some observers who see in it a a big turnaround, especially given Ellison's outspoken disparagement of software-as-a-service (SaaS).
But it should also be noted that Marc Benioff and Zach Nelson, the founders of, respectively, Salesforce.com and NetSuite, both began their careers at Oracle, and both left to start their respective companies with Ellison's blessings. Moreover, Ellison invited Benioff to speak at this year's OpenWorld, and remains an investor in NetSuite.
The move does show, however, that while Ellison has feigned indifference to SaaS applications, he is concerned that his products could lose market to SaaS vendors in the long-term, if not sooner. But Ellison didn't acquire all those software companies just to throw their products out the window.
Software analyst Ray Wang noted that "by acquiring leading companies with significant recurring revenue streams, [Oracle] can drive economies of scale to make above-average R&D investments. The result: enough innovation in existing product lines to compel customers to pay maintenance and upgrade; and the time and resources to build a next generation product."
He also noted that the pressure will be on SAP to play catch up, since it seems unlikely that SAP will ship a new product for this market until 2013 or 2014.
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