Oracle Fusion Stack

 Oracle Fusion, a term that is buzzing around already for years and getting a more mythical sound to it every year it is discussed. Fusion should be the answer to a lot of questions and it is coming, it is coming soon. Even though Oracle is promoting it and has been releasing a lot of buzz around it some people are getting tired and are getting confused. The expectation was that Oracle would provide a complete new stack in one go and that it would branded in the same way as we have seen with 11G and 12G. I have been asked a couple of times by people within the company to talk to them on what the future of Oracle will be from a technology point of view so I decided it would be a smart move to start blogging about it and provide all of you an insight into what I have found and what I think will be the future of Oracle from this point of view.

However, Oracle is releasing bits and parts of the Fusion stack, from a marketing purpose you can see this as smart, a buzz is created, or you can see this as a weakness, they start talking about something which is lacking shape at the moment they started talking about it. What a lot of people do not realize is that there is a lot Fusion out there, released possibly below the radar or people do not get the picture that it is part of the new Fusion stack. The below diagram holds a high level design of the Oracle eBS Fusion stack coming up from the database up till the functional modules. The picture is coming from the Oracle manual Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator’s Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0) launched as draft in April 2011. Even though it is confidential officially some people have released it to the public. Thanks to the people at orastudy.com we are able to take a peak in the draft version, you can have a look at the manual at Scribd.com and you can read it as a embedded document from Scribd.com at the end of this blogpost.

Looking at the picture below you can get a glimpse of the stack which to which Oracle refers to as the Fusion stack. At the top we have the Oracle Fusion Application Product Families who consist out of a lot of Oracle e-Business Suite applications and modules and will be the new core of the Oracle Fusion applications. You can see the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, I will be spending some blogpost in the upcoming time on them to explain them in more detail, you can see that most of this is based upon the Oracle Weblogic Server which is not a surprise to most of you.

 From a application point of view Oracle is dividing the applications in a couple of clustered which I will blog about more in the upcoming posts. Below you can see them in a slide from a Oracle presentation. To name them; Oracle Fusion Financial Management, Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management, Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, Oracle Fusion Procurement, Oracle Fusion Customer Relation Management and Oracle Fusion GRC or in full Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk and Compliancy.

As you can notice a great place is reserved in the stack for Oracle Enterprise Manager, this is a great part of the monitoring and maintenance stack from Oracle. What is missing in this picture is the hardware component of Oracle Enterprise Manager which has been added after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems and also the creation of the ExaData and ExaLogic machines. Oracle is now able to monitor all parts of the stack which includes both hardware and software.

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Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Management

As I am currently been working a lot on improving day to day operations and monitoring of large and complex IT landscapes I have been looking a lot at Oracle Enterprise Manager. We are currently deploying Oracle Enterprise Manager to be a the default monitoring and maintenance solution for a new cloud hosting platform. Oracle Enterprise Manager is great to manage parts of the cloud we are currently building and rolling out towards current customers and new customers of Capgemini. 

However, event hough when people think about cloud computing they tend to forget that their is still old school hardware and operating systems involved. Even though you can make all kind of thing scalable, virtual and cloud happy someone will always have to have a datacenter somewhere which holds racks and racks of servers which hold operating systems and which run things. By using cloud computing the customer is no longer that aware of the real infrastructure, if you however build the cloud you are more than aware of all the infrastructure it takes to build a cloud computing solution. When you are the provider of the cloud you will have to think about how to setup your network, how to arrange you storage and who to align failover technology, virtualization layers, monitoring and much more. 

As we as Capgemini are building a cloud computing solution especially for Oracle products we do have engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager already deep into the mainstream architecture. Oracle Enterprise Manager is giving us some very big advantages however thanks to Oracly buying Sun this is now extended with Oracle Ops Center.

When Oracle developed Oracle Enterprise Manager it was mainly focused on the applications and for some parts on the operating system where Sun was focusing more on the hardware and some parts of the operating system (mainly Sun Solaris). Now they two companies have become one the products are also merging which gives you a enormous lift and a single tool to monitor and manage software and hardware from the same tooling. Both can be used separately however can also be integrated. Currently the integration is not that fluently as you might want however as you see the Oracle roadmap the products will become more integrated every release they will bring out. 

Especially when you are building a complex and large-scale landscape like a cloud computing landscape for high-end customers running Oracle software it is of great value that you can monitor and maintain both your software, hardware and operating system from one single tool. Below you can see a short introduction video on Oracle Ops Center. If you have any questions on Oracle Ops Center and/or Oracle Enterprise Manager, leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.