Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced in Tuesday's Webcast its "Project Fusion" which will be released by 2008, while reiterating the company's continuity to Peoplesoft's products. (Xinhua photo)

    BEIJING, Jan. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced in Tuesday's Webcast its "Project Fusion" which will be released by 2008, while reiterating the company's continuity to Peoplesoft's products.

    "Project Fusion", claimed to combine PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Oracle's offerings into a "superset" of applications software, was said to be the company's next-generation information- oriented application architecture and application set. Oracle now has 8,000 developers from the three companies to the project.

    Continuity

    Ellison reassured former PeopleSoft customers that the company would support and enhance the products of PeopleSoft which it newly acquired at the cost of $10.5 billion, through at least 2013.

    It will continue doing routine maintenance work on all three of its applications lines, and will release in 2006 the next major upgrade for each: PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, EnterpriseOne 8.12 (the software line PeopleSoft acquired from J.D. Edwards) and the Oracle E-Business Suite 12. Those upgrades will be the last major updates in each line before Oracle moves to the converged Fusion line, according to report from InfoWorld.

    Project Fusion

    The new Project Fusion is a new information age architecture based on industry standards that will be modularized for flexible deployment, optimal performance and easy maintenance.

    Fusion will be a Java-based, service-oriented architecture with an automated upgrade process from PeopleSoft, Oracle and J.D. Edwards applications. "Not a conversion -- an automated upgrade," Ellison emphasized in his remarks at the event.

    "The products will be written in Java and use standards-based rules to allow easy integration with other applications¡±.¡± This is the first time a major application company is going to commit to an absolutely standards-based development environment," Ellison commented.

    Job Cuts

    Oracle announced on Friday that it would cut 5,000 jobs companywide, bringing the company's combined workforce down to 50,000.

    The company said it planned to retain the vast majority of PeopleSoft's development and support staff as part of its plans to support its acquisition's products.

    "By retaining over 90 percent of PeopleSoft's development and technical support organization, we can deliver on our commitment to all of our applications customers," Ellison emphasized.

(Agencies)