Oracle execs talk up Fusion plans

Two top Oracle executives met with analysts and customers in New York on Monday as part of an Oracle road show aimed at reassuring those nervous about Oracle's recent buying spree and its plans for a merged applications set, dubbed Fusion, incorporating its purchases.

"I know you're all wondering: is there some strategy behind all this bizarre behavior over the last six months, us buying all these companies, or is it just Oracle being Oracle?" company President Charles Phillips said at the event's start.

Phillips and John Wookey, Oracle's applications development head, reiterated the points Oracle first laid out in January, when it introduced its Fusion road map. Oracle will deliver one more major update, due in 2006, in each of its three applications lines -- its own E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and EnterpriseOne (formerly J.D. Edwards) -- and release an applications set built on a new, Java-based architecture, Fusion, in 2008. Customers on all of the product lines will be able to smoothly upgrade to Fusion without any greater pain than they encounter in a standard applications upgrade, executives said.

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