The release of the much-anticipated Fusion Applications from Oracle will be made available on a general basis beginning in the first quarter of 2011. Fusion Applications is designed to be a next-gen combination of Oracle’s mainstream offerings, including PeopleSoft, the E-Business Suite as well as Siebel.

This has been no small feat. Oracle Fusion Applications has been five years in the making, and is a tremendous effort of engineering. They design team had to take the best features of those applications and try to implement them onto Oracle’s Fusion Middleware infrastructure.

A Massive Undertaking
When we say it’s been no small feat, we mean it. Oracle Fusion Applications will have more than 10,000 unique business processes, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. As a part of the general release, there are literally 100 different products that will be put on the market all at once. This is truly a massive undertaking, one that elision says Oracle has never done before and hopes never to do again.

Development in the Wild
Oracle Fusion Applications wasn’t developed in a vacuum. The software was tested with existing Oracle customers along the way. This has helped to insure that customers will be satisfied with the user interface.

That interface doesn’t resemble existing interfaces, such as E-Business Suite or SAP. The interface has been modernized completely, adding features and functionality to the design.

On-Demand Options
The Oracle Fusion Applications can be run in-house, but they are also available in an on-demand basis from Oracle. This offers customers a number of options and tremendous flexibility. It allows them to get up and running from day one, and then switch over later to an in-house infrastructure if they choose to do that.

Low-Key Approach
In a somewhat unique move among the IT giants, Oracle intends to hold off on trying to move their customer base from older products to Oracle Fusion Applications. They recognize that many existing customers will need and want to take a wait-and-see approach, and then make the decision themselves about when is right to go to Fusion.

Will Oracle Fusion Applications live up to the hype? It’s too early to tell, of course, but it is pretty obvious that the company has a lot riding on the success or failure of this line.

Read the original blog entry...