Oracle has announced that it is on schedule for a 2008 unveiling of its forthcoming Fusion suite of enterprise applications.

"We are ahead of schedule mostly because we are dealing with processes that we already understand. The applications in our portfolio are already the leading applications in the industries that they compete in," Oracle co-president Charles Philips told a gathering of partners and customers in San Francisco.

Fusion is Oracle's forthcoming enterprise business suite which will replace the existing suites for Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. The project was unveiled in January 2005.

The suite aims to deliver a single set of code and a superset of the functionalities from the applications that Oracle has acquired over the years. Moving to a single suite will allow the vendor to bundle its development resources and spread investment costs over a large group of customers.

Fusion defines the actual applications as well as the middleware and the overall architecture.

While the final product is slated for a 2008 release, segments will be delivered piecemeal in the meantime. The first elements are already finished, according to Thomas Kurian, senior vice president for Fusion middleware architecture at Oracle.

"From a technology point of view, the biggest part of enabling the Fusion applications was done in 2005," he said.

The Fusion middleware suite will enable customers to use some of the more advanced features, including server grids and service oriented architectures. These are designed to improve business intelligence and provide better insight into business processes.