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April 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Oracle's Project X

TAGS: Applications

Rumors are flying about Oracle's so called Project X, the details of which Oracle President Chuck Phillips will announce on Monday.

The buzz is that Oracle will release business process components abstracted from its huge portfolio of ERP and CRM applications -- and will provide a framework for reassembling them into new apps tailored to specific business needs.

Actually, Oracle has been throwing strong hints in this direction for awhile now, suggesting that Fusion middleware will provide the SOA infrastructure for a new, more modular world of enterprise applications.

The Oracle Web site teases that Project X will be "an important development initiative that has been underway to unify our broad portfolio of applications and help customers close the gap between evolving business needs and IT's ability to execute."

Ironically, one of the best descriptions of what Oracle may be up to comes from an interview I did last year with BEA CEO Alfred Chuang about the future of software.

"You will have vendors like us that will be selling platforms (and) application vendors that will be selling application components, yet they will be assembled on the fly by an end-user. End-users will be using a tool -- or they will be using templates or processes -- that will represent what their environment is. They can always go back to change the process on the fly, yet the components will continue to be usable within those processes."

I'm betting that's a spot-on general description of Project X, although obviously the "platform" as well as the applications will be Oracle's, not BEA's. We'll see on Monday.

Posted by Eric Knorr on April 13, 2007 12:55 PM

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