Oracle offers Fusion details ahead of 2010 launch

Customers to be given flexibility when buying apps suite.

Oracle's Fusion suite of business applications will go on sale in 2010, chief executive Larry Ellison confirmed in his final keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 today.

The Fusion suite will tie together the most important product portfolios Oracle has acquired in recent years, and make them available via the cloud or on premise.

The products will be given updates, and new applications are on the way, Ellison explained at the customer and partner event.

"The Fusion applications will contain replacement applications, and then brand new applications that you might want to add to products such as the Oracle E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft, " he said.

Ellison added that Fusion will co-exist with Oracle's current applications, so customers would not feel pressured to upgrade.

"We will make it easy for Fusion applications to be easily integrated with applications such as E-Business suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel, and continue to make large investments in our existing applications," he said.

"We know that not all customers will replace their current applications with Fusion, and that most are likely to augment.

"We're a pretty big software company, so we can afford to build the next generation of applications as well as maintain the old ones. So, as a customer, you can move if you want to, when you want to."

Ellison explained that the first version of Fusion will not contain the same functionality as software such as E-Business suite, but that more will be added over time.

Applications ready for 2010 include: financial management, human capital management, sales and marketing, supply chain management, project portfolio management and procurement. A business intelligence (BI) add-on will also be available, although Ellison said that BI is to be at the heart of all Fusion applications.

"The user interface is BI driven. In fact you can't use the interface without BI," he said.

Ellison also said that, when providing Fusion applications via the cloud, the company will monitor the service levels it commits to with customers.

"We have built this monitoring into enterprise support to prove that we will deliver the service levels we have committed to," he concluded.