The Triora Group

In this post I’ll try to summarize the key points about the upcoming Fusion Applications from Oracle.  My expectations is that the initial release will be available in mid to late 2010 based on what was provided at Collaborate.

On Tuesday Oracle provided live demonstrations showing several of the Fusion Application modules, CRM and Human Capital Management.  Before the demonstration they discussed some of the key features which are noted following.

They discussed the new Setup Manager which will simplify setup of application modules by providing configuration templates.  These templates will have built in workflow (process flow) capabilities for each step in the setup.   These templates also allow delegation of various steps to others and yet continue to allow tracking on the overall progress.

An additional feature is that configuration information can be exported and imported between Instances to ensure similiar environments.  There is also the ability to compare configurations.

Upgrades to the Fusion Apps will retain the current architecture of your environment.  For example, PeopleSoft uses a multi-pillar setup with multiple database Instances and this will be retained.  E-Business Suite users use a single Instance setup and this will be retained for them.

A centralized Identity Management application will be external to the Fusion Applications (and other applications) while providing a common repository of user, role, responsibility and Separation of Duties (SOD) information for the applications.

All that we have heard previously about Fusion Applications being based on a Web 2.0 (Chat, Presence, Community/Wiki,RSS), Service Oriented Architecture, embedded Analytics, and Unified Data Model were confirmed.  These new applications will take the best-of-breed capabilities of CRM from Siebel, ERP from E-Business Suite and Person/HR from PeopleSoft.

The Fusion Applications will be rolled out to a controlled group of customers in late 2009.  Oracle is going to maintain a tight lid on public information on this effort.

The initial release of the Fusion Applications will include the following applications:

• Core ERP (Financial Management)
• CRM
• HR/HCM
• Procurement
• Projects
• GRC (Governance, Risk and Control)
• Supply Chain

Coming later will be these areas of functionality:

• Public Sector (fund accounting)
• Manufacturing

The intial release will not have all localizations but will be available for APAC, Europe, North American and Latin America.

The demo was very impressive and the User Interface delivers on the Web 2.0 capabilities.  It also takes advantage of the partial refresh capabilities popularized by AJAX to only refresh portions of the Web screen.  In a separate post I’ll highlight my observations further.

The Help capabilities were impressive allowing users to add comments to the Help entries.  Some Help entries included video examples and User Productivity Kit (UPK) interaction.

In summary, Fusion Applications are well on their way to being a reality and I believed Oracle Application Users will be very pleased with the results based on what was shown this week at Collaborate.

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