"If you wanted to run Fusion Applications in your company, for the next two years, the only way I would do it is with Oracle hosting," said Michael Brown, technical manager at consulting firm Colibri Limited, during a presentation this week.

Brown's talk covered the complex task of installing Fusion Applications on-premises, which requires a multilayered identity management framework along with a sheaf of other Oracle middleware, as well as servers with large amounts of main memory.

"These are not cheap servers when they are configured this big, and most of us don't have them lying around" for testing and configuration purposes, Brown said. "If you are running a small E-Business Suite system, which a lot of customers are, you don't have enough headroom for Fusion [Applications]."

Global systems integrator and E-Business Suite customer IT Convergence is one early Fusion Applications adopter. It began its implementation of Fusion HCM (human capital management) software in March, while simultaneously participating in a beta program for E-Business Suite 12.2, said CTO Gustavo Gonzalez during a presentation at Collaborate.

Fusion's features, such as the embedded BI (business intelligence), are very appealing to IT Convergence, Gonzalez said. "Things that were taking a long time for us in terms of reporting were covered inside the Fusion product."