Not to be confused with Project Fusion, the ongoing initiative to converge the Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Retek business applications, Fusion is Oracle’s rebranding of its middleware stack.
In essence, it rebrands Oracle Application Server 10g and all of its components covering J2EE, web services infrastructure, enterprise service busses and integration. Fusion also extends to Oracle’s Business Process Management (BPM) and Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools; Business Intelligence (BI); LDAP directory, security, and identity management systems; Oracle Enterprise Portal, and mobile data hubs.
As part of the announcements, Oracle also provided target dates for certifying compatibility with fusion for some of its recent acquisitions. PeopleSoft 8.4 and up will be made compatible for most Fusion components in two phases.
By calendar Q2 2004, PeopleSoft will support the LDAP server and BPEL orchestration engines. By Q4, PeopleSoft will be certified on the core J2EE application server and portal servers, plus full identity management, business integration, and BI products, which constitute most, but not all the remaining fusion components.
For JD Edwards, the roadmap was more vague. In Q3 2004, the EnterpriseOne (formerly, the newer One World line, which ran on UNIX and Windows NT) product will work with Oracle appserver and portal server. While Oracle has scheduled a second phase of Fusion support for the EnterpriseOne line for Q1 2006, it has not yet made clear its plans.
These announcements left a couple of gaps. Retek, where the ink is still drying on the acquisition announced last month, came too late to be included in the current round of fusion plans. More importantly, the Fusion announcement omitted JD Edwards World, the IBM iSeries-based product that was the mainstay of the now twice-acquired company’s line.
Owing to its separate platform and lineage, Oracle did not disclose when or whether the product would be made compliant with Fusion. In all likelihood, support for the J2EE appserver will probably be the first and least difficult step of what will be a challenging migration.
Although formally announced today, and leaked last week, the Fusion brand for Oracle’s middleware stack has been an open secret for some time. Speaking before Gartner Group’s Application Integration and Web Services conference last week, research vice president David Smith characterized Fusion as an essential component of Project Fusion, terming it a step towards the goal of unifying Oracle’s business applications portfolio through middleware.
