To allay immediate fears about dropped products and forced upgrades, Mr Phillips said that so long as someone was using one of its applications it would continue to provide some level of support. Customer resistance to forced upgrades means this type of support promise is gaining in popularity but it was mid market consolidator SSA Global who was first to market with a policy of never sun setting a product.

The Oracle promise is designed not just to ally fears about the move to Fusion, but also to reassure users of software from its acquired and soon to be acquired companies such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek and Siebel Systems.

According to Mr Phillips, part of the design criteria for Fusion is to add sufficient value to and to make the upgrade path easy so customers want to upgrade. The support program may not change the number of people who upgrade over time but customers like the chouse and don’t want to b forced to upgrade, he said.

Under the newly announced Lifetime Support Policy Oracle will offer three levels of service support. Premium covers the first five years of an application, Extended covers the first eight years and Sustaining provides for unlimited cover. However Mr Phillips did not elaborate on the terms and conditions such as how much the Extended and Sustaining support offerings would cost and what level of support would be available.

Having delivered what was clearly designed to be a message of reassurance, Mr Phillips then went on to elaborate on its architectural development plans whereby the company will build its future around Oracle Fusion Architecture.

This is the technology blueprint for its application, middleware and grid technologies that unify the trends emerging in grid computing architecture, service oriented architecture and enterpriser information architecture and is its version of SOA and componentized applications.

He said that initially he was wary of the component trend because it is not the first time it has come around but believes something is different this time and that is the use of standards.

There have been multiple attempts but this time the standards are simple enough for a human to understand. Before they were too complex. The Internet has taken control of standards across multiple areas. It is good for everyone. People have set a value on that, he said.

Oracle promised that it would demonstrate the value of standards and what their use in an SOA environment could mean, especially their potential value where existing applications are concerned.

[We will show] PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle applications operating in the same portal integrated through BPEL technology, he said. You can take [existing] applications…and orchestrate them in a single portal and as long as you expose the API as a service you can take part.

He said the Internet has taught Oracle a lot about using the same standards and it has built around that: We value standards because we can see what they can do. We have tried [componentization] three times but are ready now. Our response is to change our architecture.

As part of that the Oracle Information Architecture will evolve into Oracle Fusion Architecture, model driven, service and event enabled, standards based and information centric.

Oracle Project Fusion and Oracle Fusion Middleware are the platforms Oracle will use to take advantage of the new technology. Project Fusion will cover the evolution of the applications to the new architecture over time with the first component coming in 2007 and mainstream offerings such as ERP available in 2008.

Oracle Fusion Management is the technology used to build the applications and is in place today. The company says it already has 26,600 middleware users and this aspect of the business generated $843m in revenue during fiscal 2005, and is likely to form a substantial part of its business in the future.

As part of its plan to encourage ISV’s to further commit to the Oracle platform, Mr Phillips also issued a warning to smaller vendors not to meddle with infrastructure development because without scale they will not be able to support and maintain them.

Oracle Fusion Middleware has several components including a grid infrastructure and the Fusion Service Registry which defines all Oracle applications web services, integration interfaces for third party web services and meta data services specific to each customers’ deployment. It also includes the Fusion Service Bus, Business Process Orchestration, Business Intelligence and Business Activity monitoring and a Unified Portal. Oracle describes it as comprehensive, hot pluggable which is the ability to plug and play non-Oracle middleware components, and unbreakable.