Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

After four years since its inception, Project Fusion, Oracle’s next generation suite of enterprise applications will finally be ready to enterprises in 2010.

At the closing keynote of this year’s Openworld conference which saw about 50,000 attendees throng the city of San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the code base for the Fusion applications is ready, and customers have begun testing the products.

According to Ellison, Oracle will continue to support J.D Edwards and PeopleSoft applications under its Applications Unlimited program, along with its lifetime support policy.

The first version of the brand new Fusion Applications, built from the ground-up with its own technologies and those acquired from other companies, will include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement Management as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance. …

With more workers Twittering and connecting with one another through Facebook and other social networking sites, it is hardly surprising that enterprise technology vendors are starting to notice the potential of social media in business applications.

I caught up with Anthony Lye, Oracle’s senior vice president for CRM products who shared about the company’s Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems. The portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign and Sales Library, which allows sales reps to share information with one another, seek out sales leads by combining external information sources with internal customer data, as well as manage sales campaigns.

“Customers want to talk to other customers and these conversations are happening in Facebook and other social media,” Lye said during a media briefing at Oracle Openworld 2009. “It’s important for enterprises to listen to these conversations and take action.”

What social CRM does is to expose the structure of customer relationships within the CRM system through conversations. “For example, if I sell to telco A, can I see what telco B, C and D are buying, because people usually buy what others are buying.” …