Oracle's forthcoming Fusion suite of enterprise applications will operate more in the background and hidden from the end user. This allows enterprise software to more closely match user expectations instead of forcing them to adjust to business processes, the company said in a presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

In a demonstration at the event, the company showed off a desktop gadget or sidebar that presents users with their tasks and guides them through processes. But the actual transactions take place in familiar applications such as text editors, Microsoft Outlook and online services.

"There is still an enterprise business process that is underlying this entire transaction," said Oracle's John Wookey, who heads up the company's enterprise application strategy group.

"But there is a next generation of application expectations that users are going to have about how they get their work done."

Slated for release in 2008, Oracle's Fusion enterprise application suite is designed to deliver next generation technology as well as offer a single replacement for Oracle's current Ebusiness Suite, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel Systems' products.

Building the new software from the ground up will allow Oracle to deliver new features that users expect from today's internet age, such as real time collaboration, integrated search across enterprise systems and multitasking.

"We have categories of users coming into the workforce now for whom the internet isn't something new," explained Wookey.

"They think about working through tools that were always developed on their desktops; they are expecting more and more that enterprises are going to support that approach for how they work."