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From the Editor
A Whole Lotta Fusion Going On
By Jeff Spicer
The relationship between Oracle's products and their underlying strategy
Recently, I read the comments of an industry analyst who wrote that Oracle had managed to "mystify the market by naming everything Fusion," referring to Oracle's recent product strategy announcements and releases that bear the name "Fusion." While the analyst has a point—there is indeed a lot of fusion happening at Oracle these days—the comment doesn't take into account the fact that the various fusions—Oracle Fusion, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Fusion Architecture—are all tightly linked and share the same set of core values, if you will. These values include the utilization of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the accompanying adherence to accepted industry standards, the use of business processes as the model for how a company's software should actually work, business intelligence functionality that is integrated into relevant applications, the reliance on a grid-based foundation, and the systematic management of the entire lifecycle of all information types.
Because they share the same set of values—or principles—it makes a certain amount of sense that Oracle's product strategy, the set of products that form the platform for that strategy, and the overall architecture into which those products fit would all share a name. To clear up some of the confusion surrounding Fusion, here's a thumbnail overview of each of the Fusions and how they relate to one another.
Oracle Fusion has probably received the most ink recently, in part because it's seen as the Fusion most closely linked to Oracle's acquisition strategy. During the past 18 months, Oracle has acquired several applications companies whose offerings complement Oracle's E-Business Suite and in some cases have industry-specific functionality. Oracle Fusion is the plan by which the acquired applications will be "fused" together to create a comprehensive suite of applications.
This fusion goes beyond an integration exercise. These next-generation merged applications will be truly modular. This modularity, coupled with Oracle's business-process modeling tools, will offer a new level of flexibility in the way that businesses think about the relationship between their applications and their business processes. The new generation of applications will also make use of master data consolidation, coordinated by a series of data hubs and transaction bases. This, in addition to Oracle's business intelligence tools, has the potential to usher in a new level of insight into your business.
Oracle's plan is to roll out new functionality related to Oracle Fusion as it becomes available, while continuing to advance the individual applications product lines that it currently offers.
Oracle Fusion's modular applications will be designed based on an SOA. Applications built according to SOA are composed of loosely coupled components whose use is coordinated by a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)-based management system. Oracle Fusion Middleware is the platform that delivers SOA, making it the foundation for the next generation of applications (as well as the current generation).
Middleware got its start as the software that performs common integration tasks such as connecting software applications and exchanging data, but this category of software has evolved dramatically. Today, Oracle Fusion Middleware is a set of standards-based components that consolidates a vast array of functionality and tools from Oracle's Application Server, Data Hub, and Collaboration Suite product lines under one integrated brand family. This family includes development and management tools for J2EE, database, and composite Web service applications; a J2EE application server; identity management; portal; wireless; Web conferencing; content management; business intelligence; integration; and business process management.
Naturally, there needs to be a plan, or an architecture, by which this entire set of products is built, and that's where Oracle Fusion Architecture comes in. Oracle Fusion Architecture is a standards-based blueprint that details the interaction between enterprise applications, middleware, and grid infrastructure technologies, and defines the technology components required for Oracle's generations of Fusion applications.
Among other things, Oracle Fusion Architecture is based on SOA and grid computing, concepts that you've read a lot about in the pages of this magazine, and that you'll continue to read about in coming issues as we chronicle the progress of Oracle Fusion, Oracle's middleware components, and the related underlying strategy.
Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com
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