SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison today outlined what he said will be the first of his company's long-awaited Fusion Applications. Ellison made the announcement as part of his keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld customer conference here. The conference attracted an estimated 45,000 attendees. Ellison said the first three Fusion Applications will address aspects of sales force automation, will be built on top of Oracle's Fusion Middleware technology, and will be available as on-premise or on-demand solutions. He also said the new modules will integrate with existing Oracle enterprise applications such as E-Business Suite, Siebel, and PeopleSoft. The first three Fusion Applications, Ellison said, will be:

• Sales Prospector, a data mining application that will allow sales people to drill into customer information and identify prospects.
• Sales References, another analytical tool that will allow sales people to identify contacts and preferred references at top prospects based on input from social networks.
• Sales Tools, a database of sales presentations that have been provided and rated by members of a social network that can be accessed and reused by salespeople.

The three new applications appear to be a modest start for an ambitious effort, launched in early 2005 by Oracle, to rewrite its existing enterprise applications — E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel — from scratch. Oracle originally announced its Fusion Applications plans shortly after its takeover of PeopleSoft. At the time, the company said it planned to deliver Fusion Applications sometime in 2008. A year later, in January 2006, the company said it was ahead of schedule and halfway to delivering Fusion Applications. Today, Ellison seemed to redefine the project itself. In the past, Oracle described Fusion Applications as the company's next-generation, services-oriented suite that would represent the best functionality pulled from its existing applications. Today, Ellison said the Fusion moniker applies to any application from Oracle that is based on its Fusion Middleware, uses a services-oriented architecture, and can be deployed either on premises or on demand. By that definition, Ellision said, "If we deliver a new application in 2008, it's going to be a Fusion Application." The three initial, narrowly focused offerings leave Oracle with a lot of work to do to deliver on its promise of a full new suite of Fusion Applications. Ellison, in response to customer questions, said the company still plans to deliver major enterprise modules such as general ledger and core HR. He declined, however, to say when Oracle will do so. In separate presentations at OpenWorld, other Oracle executives also declined to provide a detailed public update on Fusion Applications, other than to say the company would "begin to deliver the first parts" of the promised product in 2008. Oracle Executive Vice President for Development Chuck Rozwat, for example, declined to say what "parts" of Fusion will be generally available next year, when a full Fusion Applications suite will be generally available, or when a version of Fusion Applications with deep vertical industry extensions will be released. Rozwat said Oracle's reluctance to share information on Fusion Applications was because of what he called the company's "very strict rules" about discussing unannounced products. Speculation about Oracle's Fusion Applications timetable grew recently following the ouster of John Wookey, former senior vice president for applications development in charge of Fusion Applications. Yesterday Rozwat, in Oracle's first public explanation of Wookey's departure, said it was caused by the company's decision to centralize the product development function. "We felt the group should be organized in a certain way, and John didn't see a role for himself," Rozwat said. Despite Oracle's refusal to discuss the Fusion Applications development program's progress, the company did provide a brief Fusion Applications demonstration and description of some of the product's features yesterday. The user interface, said Senior Vice President for Application Development Steve Miranda, will be based on Oracle's WebCenter portal platform. The product will include embedded business intelligence, role-based user access and security, and what he called business flow monitoring. In spite of Oracle's refusal to publicly provide details on the status of the Fusion Applications development program, officials said customers are satisfied. "Customers I talk with are very happy with the information they have today," Rozwat said. That may be because many customers are content to stick with current versions of Oracle applications and to put off any decisions about migrating to Fusion Applications until the new product is in the market and tested. "We may take a few more months to migrate to Fusion, but we are comfortable with that," said Tim Fleming, CIO at Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies, which is now engaged in a major, $300 million enterprise-wide project to deploy Oracle's E-Business Suite 11.5.10 in 80 plants. "We want to let the product continue to evolve." Oracle also disclosed that in the first half of next year, it plans to fill a significant gap in its product line by adding a manufacturing intelligence product that is expected to compete with tools such as SAP's xMII (formerly Lighthammer). The planned tool, dubbed the Manufacturing Transaction Hub, will be released in Oracle's 2008 fiscal year — which ends in May — as part of the upcoming version 12.1 release of Oracle's flagship E-Business Suite enterprise application offering, said Jon Chorley, Oracle's vice president for supply chain strategy, in a presentation to customers. "This is a major initiative," he declared. "We will bring into a central database [manufacturing execution system] information and harmonize and merge it with data from ERP to provide analytics and reporting." The Manufacturing Transaction Hub will include a manufacturing data model based on the ISA-95 standard for enterprise-control system integration. The product, said Andy Binsley, senior director of manufacturing and ALM applications strategy, in another customer session, will allow for the harmonization and contextualization of data coming from shop floor equipment, MES systems, and ERP applications. Oracle officials said the hub product will integrate with the MES functions that are already part of E-Business Suite 12 as well as third-party MES and manufacturing floor control systems. It will use Oracle's Sensor Edge Server product to integrate with shop floor equipment and control systems, Binsley said. The new offering will use the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition set of products to analyze plant floor and enterprise data, according to Oracle. Officials said manufacturers will be able to use the system to better understand production yields and overall equipment effectiveness and to perform same-day scheduling. The product is being designed for deployment in a single plant or in a hub-and-spoke fashion, with a central installation analyzing data from multiple plants, Binsley said. Oracle officials declined to provide additional information about the Manufacturing Transaction Hub product, such as whether it will be offered in support of other Oracle enterprise application products or even non-Oracle applications. Oracle officials also declined to say which third-party MES software providers it may be working with to validate the hub's integration and interoperability. Analysts today called the Manufacturing Transaction Hub plans important, particularly for Oracle manufacturing customers attempting to manage networks of multiple plants, including contract manufacturing suppliers. AMR Research analyst Simon Jacobson said that because the product will support bi-directional information flows, he expects Oracle to use it to enable manufacturer-supplier collaboration in much the same way that SAP's Supply Network Collaboration tool does. "Anyone managing multiple plants and sets of outsourced suppliers will be able to use this platform to look at things like the quality of sourced materials and manufactured goods," Jacobson said. "That kind of multi-plant manufacturing intelligence and collaboration is something Oracle hasn't had before." In addition to describing their manufacturing intelligence plans at OpenWorld, Oracle officials laid out a long-term development roadmap for the E-Business Suite (EBS) and spelled out a few other features that customers can expect in the next iteration, version 12.1. As part of Oracle's Applications Unlimited program, the company plans a 12.2 release of EBS in its fiscal 2009, and another release of the product in fiscal 2010, according to Chorley. In addition to the Manufacturing Transaction Hub, the 12.1 version of EBS will include several new integrations with other Oracle applications, Chorley said. Using the company's recently announced Applications Integration Architecture, Oracle will integrate EBS with its newly acquired Agile PLM suite, its Siebel CRM suite for sales force automation processes, and its Hyperion BI suite for processes such as sales and operations planning. Oracle also plans in release 12.1 to integrate with its Demantra demand planning engine to support service parts planning, Chorley said.