Reducing Fusion Confusion (Part 4): How Oracle is Approaching Development of the Fusion Application Suite
To facilitate the best of breed approach to Fusion Applications, Oracle consolidates the foundation components for each of the products in its portfolio (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) in the suite’s technology stack.
Oracle has been doing this in a 2-step process. At one level, it is pulling more products under the Fusion Middleware umbrella. Fusion Middleware has expanded from a Web server to a rich suite of products including Application Server, Identity management, Security, Business Intelligence and Application Integration Architecture.
At the next level, Oracle has been upgrading the technology stack of the application products in the portfolio so that as many products from the Fusion Middleware suite can be utilized as possible.
For example, XML Publisher, the reporting framework from the Fusion Middleware Suite of products, has been certified to work with PeopleSoft 8.48 and is seamlessly integrated with version 9.0. This means when customers use PeopleSoft version 9.0, they are ready for Fusion Applications.
The same approach is used for several of the products in Fusion Middleware suite, such as Single Sign-on solutions, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Formerly Siebel Analytics), which has been certified to work with E-Business suite.
The Fusion Applications will work on the same set of Fusion Middleware components. So you can protect your investment and reduce some upgrade-related headaches in the future by ensuring that your environment is running at least at the minimum level required to take advantage of the direct upgrade path to Fusion Applications.
In my next entry, I will discuss the available support options for Oracle Fusion.