At Oracle OpenWorld 2007, Oracle previewed some of their new “Fusion” applications for the first time - to a generally warm reception.

As a result of strategic acquisitions, Oracle now supports not only its homegrown Oracle E-Business Suite but also Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards users. While Oracle intends to maintain individual application suites indefinitely, and provide significant maintenance releases, Oracle’s key innovations are increasingly centered on re-engineered applications based on Oracle’s Fusion middleware - a predominately J2EE standards based framework. These are generally referred to as “Fusion” applications.

At its simplest level, Oracle’s Fusion applications are a single platform which will provide the functionality currently delivered in Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle E-Business. However, it is now apparent that Oracle’s ambitions for Fusion go well beyond this: Oracle is clearly trying to differentiate from key competitor SAP by providing a vision for a “next-generation” Web 2.0-style ERP application.

Fusion incorporates Web 2.0 presentation technologies - most notably AJAX - to provide a flexible, rich and productive experience. But Fusion applications also support the collaboration capabilities which have become the centerpiece of many consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook.

Oracle argues that existing ERP applications support the hierarchical structure of the organization, not the many collaborations that occur across the hierarchy or beyond the company’s borders. These collaborations currently occur via email, IM and to some extent Wikis or SharePoint-style portals. Fusion aims to provide this collaboration within the core application

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 also highlighted a capability of delivering end-user-driven “mash-ups” or dashboards. Many of the application components can be combined in a user-defined page using drag and drop. Furthermore, the user can combine external content: RSS feeds or common gadgets such as stock market tickers.

Oracle has made extensive use of Google Gadget and Google Gears technologies. Use of the former allows aspects of Oracle Fusion technology to be accessed from your Google portal. Google Gears promises to allow at least some of the functionality to remain available offline.

Oracle also has demonstrated embedded analytics that promise to allow the user to see the “big picture consequences” of their decisions. For instance, a user could see how a company-wide budget would be affected by changes to departmental spending limits. Intelligent alerts will also inform the user when their decisions are violating policy (exceeding spending guidelines, for instance).

Certainly, one must be skeptical about product demonstrations, especially for software that is still pre-release. But it’s clear that Oracle has been putting very significant energies into these next-generation Fusion applications and I personally found the applications very compelling.

Oracle has wisely assured their user base that no one will be forced to migrate from their existing Oracle ERP system in the foreseeable future. We can see now though, that Fusion applications may well promise significant increases in productivity and business effectiveness. However, the process of migration from the existing ERP suite - Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft or JD Edwards - to the Fusion suite remains unclear.

Arch-rival SAP still leads Oracle in ERP revenue and its NetWeaver architecture provides many of the same capabilities as Oracle’s Fusion middleware. It remains to be seen if Oracle’s new wave of Fusion applications will allow them to overtake SAP. You can bet that SAP will be working hard to ensure that it does not.

About the Author

Guy Harrison is a chief architect for database solutions at Quest Software, and is a recognized expert with over 15 years of experience in application and database administration, development, performance tuning and project management. Harrison is the author of Oracle SQL High Performance Tuning (Prentice Hall) and MySQL Stored Procedure Programming (O’Reilly), and is a regular speaker at trade shows and events More about Quest Software can be found at www.quest.com.