SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison yesterday said that the company’s much-anticipated and delayed Fusion Applications, in development for nearly five years, would become available next year, but without a core manufacturing module.
Speaking at the company’s annual OpenWorld user conference here, Ellison described Fusion Applications as a set of “brand new” applications covering such functions as financial management; sales and marketing; human capital management; and governance, risk, and compliance. He said Oracle has been working very closely with a number of customers to develop the applications and is now testing the product set with them.
“It is a big project and we have been working on it for a long time,” Ellison said in his keynote address. “We are code complete.” Oracle is still fixing bugs and tuning the software, he said. “I’m looking forward to delivering this next year.”
Oracle is committed to adding core manufacturing to Fusion Applications in the future, said Jon Chorley, vice president for supply chain product strategy at Oracle in an interview with Managing Automation. Oracle decided to exclude manufacturing from the initial release of Fusion Applications because the company wanted to control the scope of what is already a very large development project and because "manufacturers have not always been the fastest to adopt" new technologies such as Fusion Applications, Chorley said.