Oracle Fusion Applications ready in 2011, says CEO Ellison

Oracle Open World 2010: "Enormous engineering effort" ready to go live, as Oracle shows off "cloud in a box"

Oracle's Fusion Applications will be made generally available in the first quarter of next year, the company's CEO Larry Ellison has confirmed.

Speaking at the Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco, Ellison said the Oracle Fusion Applications suite has been more than five years in the making and described the project as "an enormous engineering effort".

Oracle Fusion Applications bring together elements of Oracle's acquisitions – including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel – to create a suite of applications that are built on a common middleware platform. By using a shared platform, the apps are easy to intergrate, Oracle claims.

According to Ellison, the suite of apps – made up of more than 100 separate modules – are driven by business intelligence, rather than simply process automation.

The applications are divided into seven product families: financial management; procurement and sourcing; project and portfolio management; human capital management; customer relationship management; supply chain management; and governance risk and compliance.

Oracle Fusion Applications, which Ellison said were developed with input from customers including Tesco, Barclays and HSBC, will be available either on-premise, via the internet, or through a mix of both.

Larry Ellison on stage at OracleWorld
(Photo credit: Oracle via Flickr.com under the following licence. Photo courtesy of Hartmann Studios)

Ellison said the apps will be delivered to some customers before the end of this year, with general availability in the first quarter of 2011.

But Ellison said he expects only 50 to 100 customers to move onto the Fusion apps in the first half of next year, adding: "For most customers, the right thing to do is see how the early deployments go". Meanwhile, Oracle will also continue to invest in its existing products such as the Oracle E-Business Suite, he said.

Ellison also used his keynote speech at Oracle World to unveil the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud - an integrated system combining servers, storage, networking and software. Describing the system as "a cloud in a box", the Oracle CEO said the Exalogic Elastic Cloud will allow enterprises to consolidate many key applications on a single system.