Ellison Details Fusion Apps, Touts Exadata Server (
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SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle
CEO and founder Larry Ellison, in the final
keynote of Oracle OpenWorld Oct. 14 here at the Moscone Center, dazzled
attendees with unexpected guests onstage, then served up some news: details
about the company's software-as-a-service-enabled Fusion Applications
middleware suite, something enterprise developers have been waiting to hear about
for months.
The surprise guests were California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Who
lead singer Roger Daltrey. Daltrey performed with his own band on the same bill
with rock group Aerosmith at the conference's closing party that evening.
The Fusion
Applications suite, which runs on Oracle's Fusion Middleware and Sun's
Java, is a next-generation group of ERP and business applications designed for
virtualized systems. The company described Oracle Fusion Applications on its
site as, "service-enabled enterprise applications that can be easily integrated
into service-oriented architecture," such as financial transaction
systems.
The built-in advantages these applications will have over those of competitors,
Ellison said, is that Oracle will automatically monitor and ensure guaranteed
service levels.
"Fusion Apps are built to be SAAS- or cloud-ready so we are committing to
their service level, which means we have to have a way to monitor their
performance to make sure we are delivering the promised level of
performance," Ellison said.
The first Fusion Apps suite will include modules for financial management,
human capital management, sales and marketing, supply chain management, project
management, procurement management, and governance, risk and compliance, he said.
However, after firing up the crowd by explaining all the whiz-bang features and
advantages of the new suite, Ellison casually mentioned that it would be
available at some point "next year." That's when a number of
attendees turned to each other, rolled their eyes and threw their hands up in
disappointment.
In addition to explaining Fusion Apps, Ellison introduced a new support portal
to help users with similar configurations anticipate problems and fix and
prevent technical issues in a collaborative manner.
"Once we fix something, why not put it out there and let everybody else
who's doing the same thing learn from the experience?" Ellison asked.
To allay fears that Oracle may be too focused on future development to think
about its legacy-system customers, Ellison assured IT decision makers that
Oracle will continue to support legacy middleware—at least for the next 10
years.
"We understand users have enormous investments in things like e-business,
PeopleSoft and JD Edwards [applications], and so we will continue to enhance
those for the next decade," Ellison told the conference. "I think we
are big enough of a company to maintain [the] software users have today and the
software they will buy in the future. You will have a choice to move to the new
applications when you want to."
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