Oracle trumpets Fusion progress

Oracle's forthcoming enterprise business suite is due in 2008

Oracle has announced that it is on schedule for a 2008 unveiling of its forthcoming Fusion suite of enterprise applications.

"We are ahead of schedule mostly because we are dealing with processes that we already understand. The applications in our portfolio are already the leading applications in the industries that they compete in," Oracle co-president Charles Philips told a gathering of partners and customers in San Francisco.

Fusion is Oracle's forthcoming enterprise business suite which will replace the existing suites for Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. The project was unveiled in January 2005.

The suite aims to deliver a single set of code and a superset of the functionalities from the applications that Oracle has acquired over the years. Moving to a single suite will allow the vendor to bundle its development resources and spread investment costs over a large group of customers.

Fusion defines the actual applications as well as the middleware and the overall architecture.

While the final product is slated for a 2008 release, segments will be delivered piecemeal in the meantime. The first elements are already finished, according to Thomas Kurian, senior vice president for Fusion middleware architecture at Oracle.

"From a technology point of view, the biggest part of enabling the Fusion applications was done in 2005," he said.

The Fusion middleware suite will enable customers to use some of the more advanced features, including server grids and service oriented architectures. These are designed to improve business intelligence and provide better insight into business processes.

Oracle downplayed the complexity and effort needed to develop an entirely new suite of applications while trumpeting the need for a new architecture based on industry standards.

The company's principal rival, SAP, has said that rewriting the application suite is needlessly complicated and cannot be done within the allotted three years.

However John Wookey, Oracle's senior vice president for applications, countered that rewriting the applications is necessary to achieve the required levels of security, scalability, performance and business agility.

"We are not hesitating at all in saying that we are rewriting large portions of our applications. That's the only way to provide the agility to our customers in running their applications," Wookey claimed.

While the Oracle presentation aimed to assure users and the overall enterprise software community that Fusion is progressing as planned, industry analyst Joshua Greenbaum, at Enterprise Applications Consulting, was not impressed.

"What's important is the applications, not the technology. I don't think it's far enough along for Oracle to declare victory by a long chalk," he told vnunet.com.

Greenbaum argued that Oracle is one year into the three-year development project but has only shown middleware and very little of the actual applications.

For customers to be reassured that Fusion is a the right platform, Oracle needs to show more functionalities for specific vertical markets and new applications, the analyst warned.