Oracle's Ellison: Fusion finally coming to fruition

I was at Oracle OpenWorld in rain-drenched San Francisco this week, but the clouds parted when it came time for  CEO Larry Ellison's finale keynote, in which he outlined the company's Fusion Application strategy.  (Unfortunately, however, I had to fly out before the Aerosmith concert at the event later that evening. As they would put it, "My get up and go must have got up and went...")

Ellison announced that Oracle would be launching its ERP-focused Fusion Applications in 2010, and they will be deployable both on-premises and in the cloud. The cloud angle is somewhat ironic, since Ellison is known to be not too keen on cloud computing -- he recently said, in fact, the concept has been co-opted by "venture capitalist 'nitwits' on Sand Hill Road.”

Fusion Applications, not to be confused too deeply with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g (which does form the foundational layer, however) is an integrated offering that will incorporate Oracle's original and acquired software assets, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards. The Fusion Application suite will also include business intelligence and analytical capabilities that will be embedded with all components of the suite.

ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz provides great coverage of the Ellison keynote. My colleague Tony Baer, who has been following Oracle for some time, also provides some insightful perspectives on Oracle's thinking via guest post at Dana Gardner's ZDNet site. Tony talks about the SOA aspects of Fusion: "It uses SOA to loosely couple, rather than tightly integrate with other Fusion processes or processes exposed by existing back end applications, which should make Fusion apps more pliant and less prone to outage. That allows workflows in Fusion to be dynamic and flexible."