Oracle serves updated enterprise apps

Oracle in a highly scripted launch has released updates for its five major applications suites.

The company hosted events around the world to unveil updated versions of its Oracle E-business Suite 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9.0, Siebel CRM 8.0, JD Edwards Enterprise One 8.12 and JD Edwards World A9.1.

The updates deliver a series of new products and thousands of enhancements to existing products in each suite.

Oracle is under pressure to deliver the updates after the company spent more than US$16bn to acquire Peoplesoft in 2005 and Siebel Systems in 2006. Critics at the time charged that the firm was mostly out to acquire new customers for its E-Business Suite, sparking fears among users that Oracle would try to push users to upgrade by cutting back on support and updates.

"Today is an important day, as we release five significantly enhanced product families," Oracle President Charles Philips said.

"These releases are proof that Oracle is delivering on its strategy to protect and extend customers' current investments in Oracle's leading horizontal, specialty and industry suites."

Oracle is in the process of developing a single, next generation enterprise application suite dubbed Fusion that will bundle all existing applications and middleware and is due by 2008. The vendor also has promised to continue developing updates for all its existing products, allowing users to update to the new applications on their own schedule.

In addition to the applications, Fusion will also bring a new Middleware suite. Both the applications and middleware are based on Java and aim to enable service oriented architectures (SOAs).