Ellison To Outline Oracle's SaaS, Fusion Applications Plans

It looks as if the company is about to start providing some answers.

CEO Larry Ellison will outline Oracle's SaaS plans and provide an update on the Fusion applications project in his keynote Wednesday at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, according to Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice president of product development.

Kurian made the comments at a press conference Tuesday following his own keynote that focused on demonstrating how Oracle's applications, middleware, business intelligence software and database system can help companies resolve such problems as poor communication between disparate order processing and supply chain systems, lack of visibility into transactional systems and poor system security, governance and scalability.

Asked several questions about the Fusion applications and Oracle's SaaS plans, Kurian repeatedly declined to comment other than to refer to Ellison's Wednesday keynote. "In that he's going to address some of these issues and where we see SaaS and our product offerings for SaaS moving as well," he said.

Following its acquisitions of PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel Systems, Oracle outlined a plan to develop the next generation of its application products called "Fusion," combining elements of its own E-Business Suite applications with those from the acquired products.

But very little has been disclosed about the effort since Ellison demonstrated some early Fusion sales force automation applications two years ago.

On the SaaS front, while Oracle provides hosted versions of many of its applications, the only software products it offers that are designed using a SaaS architecture are its CRM On Demand application and its Beehive collaboration product.

In its first quarter ended Aug. 31, Oracle reported that revenue from its on-demand software services dropped to $180 million from $195 million one year earlier.

There also have been reports that Oracle is considering offering a subscription pricing option for its software, a model that's generally associated with on-demand software.