1 Introduction to Oracle Fusion Applications

The Oracle Fusion service-oriented platform and applications suite joins next-generation enterprise technologies, applications, and services, including Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware, to change the dynamics in the applications marketplace and revolutionize business. This chapter provides an introduction to the architecture and components of Oracle Fusion Applications.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Section 1.1, "About Oracle Fusion Applications"

• Section 1.2, "Oracle Fusion Applications Design"

• Section 1.3, "Oracle Fusion Applications Runtime Environment"

For more information about Oracle Fusion Applications development and administrative tasks, see the following:

• Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide

• Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide

For more information about Oracle Fusion Middleware concepts, see the following:

• Oracle Fusion Middleware Concepts Guide

• Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide

For more information about Oracle Database, see Oracle Database 2 Day DBA.

1.1 About Oracle Fusion Applications

Using the latest technology and incorporating the best practices gathered from Oracle's customers, Oracle Fusion Applications is a suite of 100% open standards-based business applications that provide a new standard for the way businesses innovate, work, and adopt technology. Delivered as a complete suite of modular, service-enabled enterprise applications, Oracle Fusion Applications works with Oracle's Applications Unlimited portfolio to evolve business to a new level of performance. Whether it is one module, a product family, or the entire suite, Oracle provides businesses with their choice of all advancements pioneered by Oracle Fusion Applications, at a pace that matches individual business demands.

This section contains the following topics:

• Section 1.1.1, "Standards-Based Architecture"

• Section 1.1.2, "Best Practices Business Processes"

• Section 1.1.3, "Choice of Deployment Options"

1.1.1 Standards-Based Architecture

Oracle Fusion Applications is standards-based, making it highly adaptable. This standards-based technology enables you to respond effectively to change with flexible, modular, user-driven business software that is powered by best-in-class business capabilities built on open standards. Its technology framework includes the following products:

• Oracle WebCenter Portal provides design-time and runtime tools for building enterprise portals, transactional websites, and social networking sites.

• Oracle Business Intelligence provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities that enable you to analyze, present, report, and deliver organizational data.

• Oracle WebCenter Content enables you to leverage document management, Web content management, digital asset management; and records retention functionality to build and complement your business applications.

• Oracle SOA Suite provides a complete set of service infrastructure components for designing, deploying, and managing SOA composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite enables services to be created, managed, and orchestrated into SOA composite applications.

• Oracle WebLogic Server is a scalable, enterprise-ready application server based on Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE).

• Oracle JDeveloper is an integrated development environment with end-to-end support for modeling, developing, debugging, optimizing, and deploying Java applications and web services.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager offers business-driven applications management, integrated application to disk management, integrated systems management, and support experience.

• Oracle Identity Management enables organizations to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities and to secure access to enterprise resources and assets.

Using a standards-based architecture reduces the cost for integration and enables you to reuse systems and technologies. Standards-based architecture also increases the flexibility of the applications. You can fit the applications to your business by configuring not only the user interface, but also the business objects, the business processes, the business logic, and business intelligence.

The ease of managing Oracle Fusion Applications offers a low total cost of ownership that results in a faster return on investment by using tools for rapid setup and flexible deployment models, as well as providing protection for upgrades.

1.1.2 Best Practices Business Processes

Oracle Fusion Applications incorporates best practices business processes, including those from Oracle product lines, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle On Demand, JD Edwards, and Siebel to optimize the user experience and productivity.

The Oracle Fusion Applications user interface facilitates the customer-driven, intuitive design of the applications that result in large productivity gains. The user interface design of Oracle Fusion Applications is:

• Role-based, which enables pervasive delivery in multiple modes, devices, and channels

• Configurable and extensible, through JDeveloper during design time or the composer during runtime, which enhances productivity for individual users and groups of users

• Composite and contextual, providing integrated information in the context of process

• Social and collaborative, offering built-in user communities and workspace, Web 2.0 information distribution, and embedded social computing to improve collaborative work

Specific features of the user interface include:

• Role-based dashboards that you can configure to your business needs

• Unified worklists that provide lists of tasks from across the applications

• Guided Business Processes, which are organized sets of tasks that help you get your work done more efficiently

• Embedded analysis methods that provides the necessary information for completing a task

• Contextual help that provides conceptual and procedural reference information

• Oracle Fusion Applications Search, which provides a seamless search experience for easily locating and taking action on relevant data

• Tagging, which enables you to associate keywords with objects so they can be easily located

• Instant collaboration that provides the contact information for persons related to your tasks

1.1.3 Choice of Deployment Options

Oracle Fusion Applications is delivered as a suite, but can be adopted modularly. It can be adopted as a single suite, as product offerings (the highest level collection of functionality that you can license and implement), or as solutions sets that work with other Oracle Applications Unlimited product lines.

Oracle Fusion Applications is offered with the following deployment options:

• On premise, hosted by the enterprise

• Public cloud (available to the general public), hosted over the Internet by Oracle, software as a service (SaaS), or Oracle business partners offering business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions

1.2 Oracle Fusion Applications Design

This section describes the following Oracle Fusion Applications design principles:

• Section 1.2.1, "Data Model and Business Logic Design"

• Section 1.2.2, "Business Process Design"

• Section 1.2.3, "Business Intelligence"

• Section 1.2.4, "Operational Management Design"

1.2.1 Data Model and Business Logic Design

Oracle Fusion Applications uses a unified data model, which is a superset of E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel entities and attributes. You can extend this data model while maintaining consistent semantics.

Logical data striping offers flexible enterprise structures for global organizations. Reference data sets enable business units to share reference data. Reference data is managed by sets. Transactional data is managed or striped by business units. You can assign sets of codes to each business unit. There is no need to duplicate reference data for each business unit.

Oracle Fusion Applications uses trees, a hierarchy model that offers flexible hierarchies for crossing line of business processes. It also defines line of business processes more efficiently. The tree structure is in the data model and is used directly in the Java business logic and exposed through Oracle Business Intelligence.

Flexfields enable you to add custom attributes and define custom key structures in Oracle Fusion Applications.

A unified metadata dictionary, and a metadata store, accessible to all the tools, provide consistency for all the components in the technology stack and enable you to preserve changes across upgrades.

Unified concepts from existing and new applications support upgrades from other Applications Unlimited product lines to Oracle Fusion Applications.

1.2.2 Business Process Design

Oracle Fusion Applications uses a declarative business process design that leverages Oracle SOA Suite. The SOA features used include approval management flows, human workflows, Oracle Business Process Management Worklist (Oracle BPM Worklist), business rules, activity guides, and process configuration customization tools (Oracle SOA Composer). Integration, creating business processes, and human workflow is the same as it is done in SOA.

The business process design of Oracle Fusion Applications features:

• Declarative business process definition, which enables processes to be defined collaboratively between businesses and IT

• Unified business process execution through system, human, and document workflow in a single business process management foundation to optimize processes while ensuring upgradeability

• Unified process visibility and analytics with cross-organization monitoring, tracing, and variance analysis

• Flexible business process customization, which enables you to make in-flight changes to data models, rules, events, and processes

• Shared business metadata dictionary, which contains all the BPEL rules and processes

During design time, two languages are used: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), which share the same engine and metadata dictionary.

One SOA infrastructure is used per product family, but all worklists are available in one single location. For example, a worklist can include content from Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management and Oracle Fusion Financials.

All business processes are configurable using a rich set of tools (BPM Composer, Rules Editor, Routing Editor, and Profile Editor) that enable you to optimize the processes as you are using them.

For more information, see the "Introduction and Concepts" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

1.2.3 Business Intelligence

Oracle Fusion Applications offers the following Oracle Business Intelligence capabilities:

• Operational analysis, what-if analysis, analytic dashboards that enable you to adapt analytics to changes in transactional and process systems

• Unified analytic definitions and calculations

• Role-based dashboards with consistent security and navigation

• Data mining-driven sales prediction, trending, and forecasting

• Reporting (pixel perfect reports designed for printing)

A common repository product design is used across all Oracle Business Intelligence products.

For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).

1.2.4 Operational Management Design

The operational management design for Oracle Fusion Applications offers:

• Unified business services level management to achieve a comprehensive lifecycle management

• Single point of administration for applications and technology to achieve comprehensive lifecycle management

• Centralized management of users, privileges, and controls to simplify identity management and controls enforcement

• Flexible deployment options

Oracle Enterprise Manager manages the middleware and the database. It provides an application-centric view, which shows information according to the product you have deployed. It also enables you to drill down from the business process to the technology stack through a single dashboard.

Rather than managing users and roles in themselves, Oracle Fusion Applications externalizes both the users and the roles to reside in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) system. This identity management model centralizes access and entitlements, and is embedded in Oracle Fusion Applications.

Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance manages separation of duty to ensure that the roles do not overlap.

1.3 Oracle Fusion Applications Runtime Environment

After installation, a typical Oracle Fusion Applications runtime environment, shown in Figure 3-1, contains the following:

• Oracle Fusion Applications product families.

  For information, see Section 3.2, "Product Families".

• Oracle Fusion Middleware, consisting of the following:

  • Oracle Fusion Middleware infrastructure components

    For information, see:

    • Section 3.3, "Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications"

    • Section 3.4.4, "Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework"

    • Section 3.4.5, "Oracle Enterprise Scheduler"

  • Oracle Fusion Middleware components

    For information, see Section 3.4, "Oracle Fusion Middleware Components".

  • Oracle WebLogic Server

    For information, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Introduction to Oracle WebLogic Server.

• Oracle Database.

  For information, see Section 3.5, "Oracle Database".

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Applications Control (Fusion Applications Control).

  For more information, see the "Getting Started with Administering Oracle Fusion Applications" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (Cloud Control).

  For more information, see the "Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control" section in the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control (Database Control).

  For more information, see Oracle Database 2 Day DBA.