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Governor Schwarzenegger pays tribute to “two Californian success stories”, blesses merger at final OpenWorld keynote. Plus, CEO Ellison shows glimpse of long awaited Fusion apps

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison brought a heavy hitter in to his campaign to acquire systems vendor Sun Microsystems, drafting in California governor and former action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger to present at the company's user conference and lend his support to the merger.

“Let me congratulate Larry Ellison and [Sun chairman and co-founder] Scott McNealy on their great new partnership,” he said, despite the fact the $7.4 billion deal has yet to receive regulatory approval from the EC. “The sky is the limit for you and for your employees.”

Schwarzenegger paid tribute to California's contribution to the technology industry. “California is without a doubt the leader when it comes [to technology],” he said.

He also expressed the belief that technology will be the solution to many of the challenges of the 21^st century. While he supports such global warming initiatives as the forthcoming UN Copenhagen conference, he said, “I think [resolving climate change] will never happen until technology shows [that we] can reduce greenhouse gases without interrupting the economic flow.”

Product directions

Ellison, meanwhile, took the opportunity to once again tout the company's new hardware offering, the Exadata 2 database machine, which he described as “the fastest business computer that has ever been built”, and to reiterate his challenge to IBM (“which is not a Californian company”), offering any company $10 million if they can disprove his claim that the Exadata 2 runs at least twice as fast as IBM equivalent hardware.

The Oracle chief executive also gave attendees more detail on the company's long-awaited next generation applications suite, Fusion Applications. First announced in 2005, these much delayed applications have been built from the ground up on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA), using Oracle's own Fusion middleware.

“Fusion Apps have been completely architected around SOA,” Ellison explained, meaning they “are very easily connected to your existing applications. We think that's extremely important, because we think will augment what they have today with Fusion,” rather than replacing all their existing applications in one fell swoop.

Another significant development in the Fusion applications, said Ellison, is that “business intelligence was not an afterthought. The user interface is BI driven. In fact, you can't use the system without using BI.” Embedding BI into applications and therefore business processes will allow employees to make better decisions, Oracle argues.

The Fusion code is now complete, Ellison said, and is now being tested. Fusion Applications are currently due for release 'some time next year', the company said.

Ellison also revealed that business service level monitoring has been built into Fusion Apps, and will also be available for its existing applications through forthcoming editions of its Enterprise Manager application management tool-kit. This allows users to link IT infrastructure performance to service level agreements they may have promised to the customer (internal or external), so if that SLA is not met, the IT department can locate the underlying problem.

“We built the Fusion applications to be software-as-a-service ready, or cloud-ready if you prefer,” Ellison explained, “and when we provide SaaS, customers ask for committed service levels. We thought that if we were going to commit to service levels, we needed a system to know if we were hitting them.”

And Ellison announced an addition to its technical support infrastructure, that like business service level monitoring draws on the IT service management principles advocated by the ITIL framework. Oracle is preparing to build a global configuration database containing details of how all its customers have configured their Oracle software. This will allow the company to alert customers to potential bugs to which their particular configuration may be prone.

“This allows us to proactively support our customers,” said Ellison. “No-one's been able to do this before, because they haven't had that information [in the global configuration database].”