Oracle Corp.'s long-promised new enterprise application suite, Fusion Applications, won't be a reality for at least another year, according to Oracle officials who spoke at the company's OpenWorld customer conference in September.

In 2005, shortly after acquiring PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, Oracle announced its plans for Fusion Applications, which, the company said, would be a new suite of offerings combining the strengths of its stable of application products, including E-Business Suite. Oracle said then that it intended to roll out a comprehensive set of Fusion Applications in 2008. In January 2006, Oracle said it was "halfway" to that goal. Since then, Oracle officials have declined to discuss the rollout schedule.

In panel discussions at OpenWorld in San Francisco, however, Oracle officials said the company is now shooting for late 2009 for a rollout of Fusion Applications. And, in a published interview, Oracle Senior Vice President of Fusion Applications Development Steve Miranda said only early customers are likely to receive Fusion Applications late next year.

At OpenWorld, however, Oracle did conduct limited demonstrations of pieces of Fusion Applications, including what it called Financials Fusion Edition, as well as new customer relationship management and human capital management applications. Officials indicated that the new products would feature tightly integrated business analytics and collaboration based on Web 2.0 technologies, such as unified communications, wikis, and instant messaging.

Financials Fusion Edition will include embedded business intelligence and exception notification that will alert users to important changes in financial information, said Fusion Product Strategy Vice President Chris Leone. The financials application also will be integrated with an enterprise performance management suite, based on Oracle's Hyperion BI application, that will provide audit and compliance management capabilities.

Oracle's Fusion HCM applications, Miranda said, will make social networking a central construct. Managers, for example, will be able to determine which employees tend to work most closely together. The applications also will make it easy to compare employees' performance with that of their peers and to quickly take action, such as instituting a promotion or salary change.

The Fusion CRM offering, meanwhile, will rely heavily on Web 2.0 collaboration and BI. Users, for example, will be able to use instant messaging, discussion forums, and RSS feeds to transmit up-to-date account information to sales representatives. And sales reps will be able to use embedded analytics to rate deal potential and determine what collateral material will be most effective with specific clients based on success rates with other clients.

Oracle declined to discuss Fusion Applications for this article.

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Managing Automation.