Ellison talks up open-standards Oracle Fusion apps

The next generation of the Oracle's Fusion applications will be available on general release from the first quarter of next year, the company's chief executive Larry Ellison said during a keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday.

The new suite of apps will be available to a selection of current customers at the end of this year, but Ellison says they will be available more widely from the start of 2011.

The development of Oracle Fusion Apps is the culmination of several years' work, and the new suite of modular apps is based completely on open standards, which the company says benefits both IT and business by lowering short and long-term costs.

"We knew we had to do a next generation, bringing together the best features of PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite and Siebel... more than five years later, we're finally there," said Ellison.

The suite contains over 100 app modules spread across seven product families, and is built on a service-oriented architecture. "For the first time ever, the Fusion applications that we deliver to you will be built on top of a 100 percent, vanilla, Fusion middleware — nothing added," Ellison said. "Fusion middleware completely supports Fusion applications — it has never been done before in the industry."

Oracle's app package allows users to make context-relative workflow decisions by providing exception-based processing, business intelligence (BI), transactions and collaboration information within the suite, rather than necessitating the use of other separate BI systems.

The company says that the services are available for deployment in a number of ways: on-premise, private cloud, public cloud or by outsourcing business processes. As a modular, open-standards-based suite of apps, the Fusion line-up will work alongside existing Oracle or third-party applications, meaning that business customers don't have to abandon their current apps.