SOA: Oracle's Project X — Will it LeapFrog Project Fusion?

Oracle has been on an architecture path called Fusion for some time.  Part of Fusion’s goal is to be able to bring together some of the very many different applications and technologies that Oracle has been acquiring (28 new suites since January of 2005).  Skillbuilders, an Oracle training and consulting group, has a good slideset that describe some of the details of the Fusion strategy and highlights some of Oracle’s existing Middleware components.  Fusion Applications aren’t expected to be available until 2008.

eWeek is now reporting that a new strategy is bubbling up at Oracle that may impact what is going on with Fusion.  Rumor now has it that Oracle co-president Charles Phillips will announce today a new ‘composite application’ strategy that Oracle is codenaming ‘Project X’.

Project X is intended to be an SOA-based application integration framework strategy that lets users define a business process that can combine the best functionality from Oracle’s many different application stacks.  In the example that eWeek cites, a composite application could be built that makes use of components found in I-flex, Siebel and Oracle.  The user accesses all suite functionality via a single sign-on and operates in a aggregated Project-X workflow process that moves among all suite elements.

Project X seems to share many of the goals and ideas behind what Fusion is going to accomplish, but teh differentiator for Project X is the ability to create ‘composite applications’.  These new applications might be created by Oracle, its partners, or end users themselves.  Project X provides the integration glue services to enable the new breed of application to be built.

What about licensing?  We’ll need to wait and see, but it looks like a single license might apply to the composite application, so users won’t need to license the individual suites.  But if users can create their own composite apps, they, in effect, would have access to all suite functionality.  It will be interesting to see what kind of pricing would apply.

If Project X takes on life and works as advertised, how will it coexist with and be positioned against Fusion?  Gartner commented that Oracle may be trying to address customers who have indicated to Oracle that they’re happy with their current applications and they are not interested in moving to Fusion. 

Project X may be a concession to those users.   But this strategy may be expensive for Oracle long-term to have to maintain many different overlapping application suite code bases.