Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Fusion Applications – A very quiet release

Larry Ellison's launch of Fusion Applications was so subtle it went quite unnoticed under the back drop of the Exadata V2 announcement. Fusion Applications has been in the gestation period for so long, that we all expected its release to be trumpeted across all channels and be a marquee event for OOW – 2009. Instead it qualified as the fourth bullet on Larry Ellison's keynote. Oracle must be down playing this release for strategic reasons, as it was obvious that a tremendous amount of work has been put into this product. With a data model consisting of 6534 tables and 18,385 views it has the makings of an enterprise class ERP. Some of the salient features are:

  • Fusion application is designed to extend existing "legacy" applications (EBS/PS/JDE) with bolt-on processes
  • Net-new functionality provided with new apps modules
  • High focus on quality with 700+ beta customers
  • Immense focus on usability, with roles based dashboards
  • Web 2.0 and social networking features embedded within the application
  • Built for on-premise or SaaS or a hybrid model
  • Built from the ground up around a MDM based data model, with a standardized model for defining business objects such as customer/item, etc.

Since the NDA's have loosened some of the initial screen shots have been released. They look like OBIEE screens, which is not surprising as the UI for Fusion Apps was meant to be BI based. Some of the screens are shown below:



 


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