More than five years later – we are finally there: Larry Elison announcing Fusion Applications

Larry Ellison: We set out to deliver the next generation of business applications. Our task: Take all of the best features from Oracle’s major application products – including E Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JDEdwards. Rebuild them, on top of modern middleware infrasructure, all written in Java. It took us five years of engineering. Now, we are finally there.

First we had to build the middleware. Then we rebuilt all the applications. We will start to deliver at the end of this year. In Q1 2011 there will be general availability of all modules.

I want to make it very clear that it runs on exactly the same existing Fusion Middleware technology that is available to all out customers. We use what you (can) use too.

It took some effort. Originally the Applications development teams said that the existing middleware was deficient in 75 ways. They had all sorts of internal workarounds. Then the mandate for the FMW teams became: Fix that (those 75 deficiencies). We have merged the teams together [under Thomas Kurian].

“Now we run 100% vanilla FMW, nothing added. “

This year we will spend $4B in R&D [software product development]. We will also continue to enhance JDEdwards, PeopleSoft, E Business Suite and Siebel, to continue to keep it current.

Screenshot of one of the new Fusion Applications modules: