It was very late in the evening and deep into the flow of keynote speeches at Moscone Center, but Oracle CEO Larry Ellison finally got around to showcasing that the company’s long-awaited set of Fusion applications. The new apps, which are scheduled for introduction in the first quarter of 2011, will span a broad range of enterprise applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) as well as the financials, human resources, supply chain management and other asset management that normally fall into the category of enterprise resource planning (ERP).

These Fusion Apps will be “fused” by Oracle’s Fusion-branded middleware and now, thanks to the high-profile acquisition of Sun Microsystems, they can be tightly bound and hermetically sealed in a new line of servers that’s called Exalogic, which Ellison – who has often been dismissive of the concept of “cloud computing – terms “The Cloud-in-a-Box”. On stage was a cabinet with the Exalogic name and both Sun and Oracle’s logos. To conform with Ellison’s definition of an “elastic compute cloud” (which is inspired by Amazon’s EC2), it Oracle’s flavor of virtual machine (VM) technology running and two “guest” operating systems – Sun’s Solaris and a new version of Linux. To make everything run more quickly and smoothly, every box also runs a Oracle’s proprietary cache management system called “Coherence”.

In his keynote, Ellison made it clear that the new server is designed to outperform IBM’s family of servers on price and performance. At the same time he made it clear that, while it will carry the Sun and Oracle brands, the cloud is designed to be “elastic” (meaning highly scalable), “virtual” (meaning that it can be offered as a service and the corruption of one instantiation won’t pollute another), and that it “conforms to standards” (though he called “Oracle” a standard, along with Linux). There’s a schizophrenic nature to the new platform. On the one hand, it is packaged in a way that is designed to accelerate the speed of deployment of enterprise apps and will also rid apps of latencies, even at high volumes of activity. If Ellison’s assertions are accurate, the new platform and forthcoming Fusion Apps could accelerate the cause of RC as well.

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Tags: CRM, Recombinant Comunications, Activity Streams, Social CRM