Fusion Is Coming, Sooner Than You Might Think

The eternal quest to come up with a definitive timeline, much less a definition, for Oracle's Fusion Applications may have just gotten a little easier. Step one was Oracle's release of its Application Integration Architecture, formerly known as Project X, which provides the glueware that can link different processes in the vast Oracle portfolio into well-orchestrated, super processes that span the different product families. As myself and a number of analysts opined at the dawn of Oracle's Fusion strategy, this middleware linkage of Oracle's best of breed processes into individual uber-processes looked like the only way Oracle was going to make good on its Fusion Applications promise by mid-2008. 

Step two has now been unveiled, in the form of Fusion Business Intelligence applications, due out later this year. The FBI applications (my acronym, not Oracle's -- and just too irresistible not to try to use) are based on the Siebel BI products Oracle acquired when they nabbed the CRM vendor. One of the first FBI applications will be part of the Oracle Transportation Management, itself made up of pieces from the acquisition of G-log. The pieces are starting to come together.

FBI applications don't necessarily fulfill the true promise of Fusion Applications -- that's more in line with what AIA promises to deliver. But these new BI applications do give us some insight into how Oracle plans to brand Fusion applications and how much the company is willing to redefine Fusion as its product plans start catching up with its marketing rhetoric. 

Also revealed in my recent discussion with Oracle is some color on how their product integration plans are going. G-log turns out to be an interesting case: while it runs on the Oracle DBMS, among others, as well as the Oracle Application Server, among others, it is actually not slated to be certified for Oracle Fusion Middleware until some later date. Meanwhile, key Fusion Middleware features like identity management and security won't be possible for Oracle Transportation Management -- ie G-log -- customers. This means that deep integration with e-Business Suite and JD Edwards aren't immediately available either. It looks like sometime in 2008 before all this integration will be in customers' hands. 

Slowly and surely, the strategy for Fusion Applications are starting to show itself. At a minimum, having a more definitive vision for Fusion Applications will help everyone, customers and competitors, understand where this is all headed. So, a little Fusion here, a little Fusion there, and pretty soon you're talking some real applications. It may not be exactly what was promised, or even hoped for internally or externally, but now we know -- much more than we did two months ago.