As Published In May/June 2005

Oracle Outlines Apps Strategy
By Rich Schwerin

Service-oriented architecture to deliver more adaptive, cost-effective applications

The combination of Oracle and PeopleSoft represents a business with more applications and database customers than any other company in the world. Naturally, these customers are curious about the future and what it holds in terms of product development and support.

"Oracle and PeopleSoft are at a similar juncture in terms of how much more application development we envision in the current generation of technology and how much we need to start shifting into the next generation," says John Wookey, Oracle's senior vice president of applications development. There's an evolutionary path for Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards customers to follow to achieve the benefits of Oracle Information Architecture and standards-based business processes. But in terms of shifting to the next generation, Wookey points to plans for Oracle Fusion, a next-generation information-oriented architecture and application set supporting the best features, flows, and usability of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards products.

Oracle Fusion

According to Wookey, Oracle Fusion is an Information Age architecture based on industry standards that will be modularized for flexible deployment, optimal performance, and easy maintenance. With Oracle Fusion, Oracle's information-driven applications will incorporate key strengths of all product lines and focus on business-process automation, industry-specific capabilities, superior usability, real-time information access and reporting, and a shared data model to provide customers with a single source of truth.

"Fusion leverages the latest Oracle technology for scalability, availability, security, and performance," says Wookey. "It embraces some changes that have been happening architecturally in systems development for the last decade that have really come to maturity in the last several years around a concept called service-oriented architecture, or SOA."

The primary advantage of Oracle Fusion's completely standards-based SOA is that customers will have a standard operating model around which to integrate other systems. A standards-based SOA is more adaptive and cost-effective for customers to deploy, especially when integrating legacy systems, explains Wookey. The first phase of Oracle Fusion will lay out this architectural model; the next will deliver applications on top of it.

Product and Support Timeline

Next Steps LEARN more about the combined companies more about Oracle Customer Data Hub

Oracle will support the existing product lines in their current technology architectures through 2013. Reiterating Oracle's plan to enhance and support future versions of PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards products, Wookey provides an estimated release timeline: Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 (2005), Oracle E-Business Suite 12 (2006), Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 (2006), and Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 (2006). Oracle plans to deliver ongoing JD Edwards World enhancements. The current Oracle Fusion timeline is to make the first products, specifically data hubs and transaction bases, available sometime next year. Then, in 2007 and 2008, the company plans to release Oracle Fusion-based applications such as Human Resources.

"We want people to make sure that if they've licensed the applications from Oracle E-Business Suite, they should move forward with those deployments," asserts Wookey. "When Fusion is available, there will be a way for those customers to move into that world."

Oracle Customer Data Hub customers can start moving toward Oracle Fusion today, Wookey says. Data hubs, he adds, let customers rationalize conflicting customer data among existing applications. "Oracle Customer Data Hub uses many Fusion principles, such as a central, strong information model surrounded by a set of both data-management services and J2EE-compliant application-programming interfaces that you can expose as Web services," says Wookey.