SAN FRANCISCO: After days of receiving teasers about Oracle’s much-touted Fusion Applications during the course of OpenWorld 09, attendees finally got the official word from Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison who announced that the suite will be ready to roll out next year.

“We are code complete. We are now in test with customers,” he told the audience at the closing keynote of the event.

The first version of Fusion Applications will include financial management, human capital management, sales and marketing management, supply chain management, project portfolio, procurement management, and governance, risk and compliance apps.

Ellison said the next-generation suite of apps combines the best elements of Oracle’s various business software product lines and has BI (business intelligence) embedded throughout the applications.

“Special emphasis was also placed on improving the user experience,” he added.

Acknowledging that its customers have already made large investments in its Siebel, eBusiness Suite, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft apps, Ellison said that Oracle will continue to develop those existing apps for the next 10 years and beyond.

“We can afford to not only maintain the software you’re running today but can also build the software you want to move to tomorrow, whether it’s tomorrow, next year, five years or 10 years from now,” he said.

Get fused

Fusion Applications are written totally in Java and are based on SOA (service oriented architecture). Ellison said this model allows users to easily connect the Fusion Applications to their existing deployments.

“We don’t think all customers are going to replace what they have today with Fusion,” he added. “We think they will augment what they have with some Fusion as it is designed to be delivered that way.”

Oracle has also made sure that Fusion Applications are ready to be deployed on-premises or via the SaaS (software as a service) model.

For the latter, Oracle said it has developed monitoring tools that will track the performance of the apps to ensure customers receive the service levels they have paid for.

Here the solution is to combine its new SaaS support system, called My Oracle Support, with the on-premises Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Oracle said this integration helps customers in the time-consuming task of patch management by providing proactive problem detection and patch automation.

The system works by gathering a customer’s entire system configuration and sending it to Oracle’s global configuration database. As such the system works on a voluntary basis, Ellison said.

Once the information is analysed, My Oracle Support will recommended the appropriate fixes which will then be downloaded by Oracle Enterprise Manager. — KELLY GOH