Oracle unveils fruits of Project Fusion

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.

In addition, enterprises using existing Oracle applications can also augment their software with new applications. These include Distributed Order Management, Customer Data Hub and Talent Management, among others.

Built with a service-oriented architecture in mind, Fusion applications and their underlying components can connect with other applications to pass on data in business processes that span across various lines of business. The software components are all built in Java and can run on industry standard Java middleware.

Business intelligence is also built into the applications for the first time. During a demo, Oracle executives showed a new user interface that notifies IT if something goes wrong with information about what needs to be done to fix a problem, how to do it and possible colleagues to contact for help.

Interestingly, the new Fusion applications are also ready for deployment on the cloud in the form of SaaS (software as a service). However, it is uncertain how Oracle will help companies with the operational processes that need to be undertaken to perform a migration of their software and data to the cloud.