Oracle boss Larry Ellison has confirmed that the firm’s Fusion Applications will finally see the light of day during the first quarter of 2011.
Five years in the making, the business software suite was described by Ellison as a huge engineering effort. It has, he said, taken the best parts of acquired companies such as Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards and put them together.
Fusion Applications will contain 100 modules across seven different product areas: financial management, procurement and sourcing, project and portfolio management, human capital management, CRM, supply chain management, and governance risk and compliance.
The new suite is built on standards-based middleware, which Ellison said simplifies integration and management. Business intelligence (BI) is at the heart of Fusion Applications, Ellison said, rather than just being included in the platform. This should remove the need for separate BI platforms, he added.
Oracle will start delivering Fusion Applications to customers later this year, followed by general availability in the first quarter of next year. "However," said Ellison, "we will be cautious and expect our customers to be as well. We expect 50-100 customers in the first half of next year, while many will wait to see how deployments go first."
It can be offered on premise or on-demand, or both, and customers will be able to switch between the two. This separates Oracle’s offering from the likes of SAP who only offer either cloud- or on premise-based software, Ellison said.
"Oracle Fusion Applications bring a new era of application software and technology investments going forward," said Steve Miranda, SVP of Oracle Application Development. "To set a new standard, we listened and gathered the best practices from thousands of customers to deliver the first 100% open and standards-based business applications."
