More on Fusion from Oracle

All over the newswires the past forty-eight hours or so has been Oracle, with several items coming from the big guys. Yesterday, Oracle executives attempted to play a PR ploy in seeking to allay customer concerns on Tuesday about the future of its product, and specifically about the long-awaited Fusion.

The gist of the message sent was that customers will not be forced to give up older product acquired by Oracle once the Fusion philosophy is fully implemented. Oracle executives also restated their previous promised to “indefinitely” offer three levels of support for products from its multibillion-dollar acquisitions of Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft. Product releases announced previously are still on track for their scheduled released dates; said product includes, the Siebel version 8, PeopleSoft version 9 and Oracle CRM version 12 lines.

Speaking from a position of confidence (perhaps knowing of the next announcement Oracle would make on that day, Loic le Guisquet, Oracle’s senior vice president of CRM for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, stated emphatically, “All of the product lines are going to go on developing. Be assured about that.” Le Guisquet spoke strongly of past promises as well: “We committed to protect your investment.”

Following these bits, Oracle released a few more details regarding the company vision for Fusion, the Oracle plan for product integration expected for delivery by 2008. Of crucial importance for enterprises is long-term integration, which makes for enormous investments in complicated software products. Fusion will be prominently based on Siebel on-demand and on-premise CRM products, and seeks to combine the functionality and design from Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft CRM and JD Edwards CRM. Oracle and Siebel development teams will use open standards and service-oriented architecture, using standards such as business process execution language and XML.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a solution designed to integrate just about any business application you can think of, including Oracle Application Server 10g; Web Services infrastructure; Enterprise Service Buses and Integration; Business Process Management and Activity Monitoring; Business Intelligence Tools; Security and Identity management; Enterprise Portals and Mobile; Data Hubs and Oracle Collaboration Suite.

In the unceasing effort of all CRM providers to make application integration easier for clients, the theory behind Oracle Fusion Middleware is to provide a comprehensive, open, standards-based approach for deploying service oriented architectures.