Fusion Applications is still in the works and there is no date announced for availability. Oracle’s vision for Fusion Applications is to create an application suite that unifies best-of-business capabilities from all Oracle Applications in a complete suite. This means, for example, it could be an amalgamation of strong HR functionality from PeopleSoft paired with core Financials from E-Business Suite.

It is less clear how it will play out in practice. It could be a totally new suite of applications, apart from E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. Another scenario is that the solution could enable you to pick and choose the modules you want to install and those modules may come from multiple, pre-existing Oracle product families. For example, in a single instance, you could select PeopleSoft HR and E-Business Suite financials with the underlying technology stack at the database and Application Server level supporting such a configuration.

Complementing the Fusion Applications is Oracle’s Applications Unlimited strategy. I’ll cover that in my next entry.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is available now. It is a loose collection of middleware infrastructure tools and components centering around Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Application Integration, Web Server, Collaboration Suite, etc. When it comes to licensing, you may have to license each one independently. A complete listing of middleware products can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html.

If you are going to use any of these products, you should verify the certification matrix to ensure the product combination is certified. For example, Oracle 10g Application Server is not certified with 11.5.10.2 E-Business Suite. If you want to take advantage of all that 10g AS has to offer in your E-Business Suite environment, you need to upgrade your E-Business Suite environment to R12.

My next entry will be about Fusion Applications.

With its continuous spree of acquisitions and increasingly complex array of solutions, the Oracle branding strategy is not getting any easier to follow.

It’s a throwback to the time when Oracle struggled with branding the middleware platform. First it was called Web Application Server (WAS), then Internet Application Server (iAS). Finally, a longer term strategy was put into place with 9iAS and 10gAS.

Coming back to the source of the confusion with Fusion, Oracle, in all its wisdom, has chosen the same name for its Applications and Middleware suites of products. I will talk about each of them in upcoming entries, starting with Fusion Middleware.

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary last week. That’s 10 action-packed orbits around the sun! In actual fact, we passed this milestone on February 28, 2008, but wanted to have the celebration in a month that offered better weather than is typical in late February in Chicago.

Over 300 people joined us on June 4 at the Adler Planetarium for an evening of networking, dancing and good cheer. The Galileo Room was filled to capacity with clients, partners, vendors – and our wonderful and talented employees and their spouses. The energy in the room was truly amazing.

A link to the video we developed for the event appears at the end of this entry. Whether you know Synch well or not, it provides a good way to gain a deepened sense of who we are as a company, and what we stand for.

Follow this link to our “Elevating Value” video. Follow this link to our 10th anniversary celebration picture gallery.