When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft last year, perhaps the most striking announcement is the launching of Project Fusion — aiming to bring together the best of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards into a single product! My first impression is one of skepticism. In fact, when SAP slams the endeavor as Project Confusion, I just casually nod in agreement. What compounds the confusion for me further is the existence of other projects also dubbed as Fusion but which sounds to be in much mature states.

In my exploring of podcasts recently, I stumbled across the Oracle Technology Network’s Techcast. There I found the episode titled Understanding Oracle Fusion Architecture and Fusion Middleware. This episode is already a few months old, taken at the Oracle OpenWorld’s Applications day, though I still recommend it to anyone looking a understand Fusion a little better.

Here’s a brief summary I find worth noting. Fusion can be described as a set of components:

Fusion Architecture
Blueprint for businesses of how things fit together
Fusion Middleware
Backbone for putting things together. This describes the suite of technologies that is composed of the following:

  • Portal technology
  • Business process management technology
  • Business intelligence technology
  • Security technology
  • etcetera…
Project Fusion
The next generation set of applications themselves

From what I gather, Fusion Middleware is the most mature component in the set. There are several Fusion Middleware technologies already taken advantaged of:

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
allows business processes to be managed in one place: out of application code. Currently used to integrate Retek, Oracle and PeopleSoft financial offerings.
BAM (Business Activity Monitoring)
real-time dashboard of events going on within your business
XML Publisher
produce hi-fidelity business transmittal documents and reports designed with familiar Microsoft desktop tools

On a side note, an anonymous blogger thinks that the the look and feel of Fusion Applications will be closer to that of the PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. The next generation of applications are expected be AJAX-based, which I think is a natural progression for PeopleSoft Enterprise.

Update

This post from PeopleSoft Corner provides a better overview on the topic.