Oracle fusion - Hot or Not? Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Oracle has a long history of innovation and they are sometimes way-ahead of the technology curve, often introducing features years ahead of their time.  For example, Oracle parallel query was introduced long before SMP Oracle servers became commonplace.

The central question is whether Oracle new features will have widespread adoption.  We see that Oracle 10g Grid computing was pushed heavily, yet the Gartner Group noted that only a small number of Oracle shops have adopted RAC clusters for their Oracle systems:

"Betsy Burton of Gartner noted that adoption of Oracle9i RAC has been quite slow, and she predicts that by the year 2006, only about 10 percent of Oracle users will be utilizing RAC within their production applications."

Oracle next big thing is "fusion" technology, developed as the direct result of Oracle's purchase of Siebel and Peoplesoft, and Oracle's need to integrate these ERP offerings.

Will Oracle Fusion see widespread acceptance?

The central question is whether Oracle fusion technology will see widespread usage.  Oracle has incorporated fusion technology into the stack for Oracle 10g Application Server, and they hope that their fusion approach will be widely used.

Only a small percentage of Oracle customers use Oracle Application Server, and a smaller number have Oracle REP products such as Oracle Applications, Siebel and Peoplesoft.

Inside Oracle Fusion Technology

Oracle Fusion is a middleware stack, and Oracle states that Oracle Fusion has these features:

"First, [Oracle Fusion is] a common technology middleware platform across all of these different applications. Second, they can use this middleware suite [Oracle Fusion] to integrate these different applications with each other. And third, they can use this middleware suite to extend the capabilities of these applications to the enterprise."

But what is "Oracle Fusion Middleware" exactly, and why will Oracle customers use it?  (BTW, the term "middleware" is a registered trademark of TechGnosis Inc).  After all, Oracle customers have many middleware options, and only a minority use Oracle Application Server.  Will Oracle Fusion change this?

Oracle Fusion for the Masses?

This article states the specific features of Oracle Fusion as using SOA (the Service Oriented Architecture) and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to create hot-pluggable components into middleware:

"According to Oracle's Viarengo, it is the web services support and so-called 'hot-pluggable' nature of its SOA Suite and Fusion Middleware that set it apart from rival middleware stacks.

"The importance of Fusion Middleware being hot pluggable is not just nice marketing for us - we need it to be pluggable so we can use it to underpin the integration of our acquired application stacks [not least PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel]," he says.

"In fact you can run the core components of our middleware on top of other technologies - so you can run our business process execution language [BPEL] server on top of JBoss, or BEA WebLogic if you want to.""

The jury is still out, and it remains to be seen whether Oracle Fusion will gain widespread acceptance outside the small percentage of Oracle customers who need Oracle Fusion to integrate Siebel, Peoplesoft, J. D. Edwards and Oracle eBusiness suite.