A January 18th 2006 event with Oracle President Charles Phillips and other executives gave Oracle the opportunity to highlight a year of success with Oracle Fusion. The company is halfway through the Oracle Fusion Applications development process and has a detailed roadmap for new functionality that will enable its diverse customer base to plan to upgrade to Oracle Fusion Applications.

According to Oracle President Charles Phillips, Oracle's goal with Fusion is to "build the next-generation of applications that are completely standard; to be the first company on the planet to build a full suite of applications for large and small companies based on standards."

Standardization is common at every other layer from databases to networks, but it has not happened at the application layer. Oracle will be the first to do this and will drive this standardization effort. Also, Oracle will use its extensive experience developing applications and deploying them with customers, while making sure to differentiate those applications with deep industry content. Finally, Oracle has a goal to ensure that 80 percent of its customers will be eligible to upgrade to Fusion Applications with the first release.

Fusion is three things: it is Fusion applications, Fusion Middleware, which is the platform on which applications will be built, and Oracle Fusion Architecture, which is the complete blueprint on how Oracle plans to build and deploy technology in the applications.

	Established the requirements
	Built the toolset
	Built the middleware
	Defined the data model and mapped the functionality that is planned for future releases of Oracle Fusion Applications

Oracle has many years of experience releasing new products and getting Oracle's 275,000 existing customers to evolve to next-generation products. However, customers upgrade when they see business value. Phillips states, "It's up to us to earn that upgrade." According to John Wookey, Senior Vice President for Applications Development, a key priority is for Oracle is to make the upgrade to Fusion as automated as possible, and to reduce cost and downtime.

The company has focused initially on middleware because middleware is critical to the next generation of applications that are service-based. Oracle Fusion Middleware is a standards-based technology infrastructure that enables the Fusion applications and the Fusion architecture. It is made up of a single development toolset and a single application framework that allows users to build enterprise applications on a service architecture.

Oracle's strategy for the near future is to emphasize innovative industry applications because industry processes are important to customers. Overall, Oracle Fusion will enable the company to emerge as world class in applications, middleware, databases, content management, management tools and security, as well as provide ways to integrate the technology and make it work together for customers. Oracle Fusion will offer improved security and management, and will make it easy to upgrade and evolve the entire infrastructure.