In an effort to allay many users? fear about their business software eventually becoming obsolete and, as a result, losing support for these applications, Oracle Corp.?s president, Charles Phillips, last week announced lifetime support for all new and existing users of Oracle applications, including products developed by acquired companies such as PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

Oracle has been acquiring companies left and right to achieve its goal of becoming an end-to-end enterprise software vendor. As a result, the company early this year announced Project Fusion -- which intends to merge the assets of JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Oracle applications, and eventually Siebel Systems Inc., into a next-generation product suite.

The announcement of Project Fusion, however, has made many users worry about support being cut off should they decide against upgrading to the next-generation product suite which will be delivered by 2008.

?Oracle cares about its customers,? said Phillips during his keynote speech at Oracle?s largest OpenWorld conference ever. Phillips told more than 35,000 delegates that the new lifetime support policy will essentially have three levels: Premier Support, Extended Support, and Sustaining Support.

Premier Support will be a five-year support program, while Extended Support will be for eight years. Those who avail of the Sustaining Support service will get support for an unlimited number of years. Phillips, however, did not divulge the pricing for the Lifetime Support Program. But in an open forum during another keynote session, Juergen Rottler, executive vice president for Oracle On Demand and Support Services, said there will be a ?no change (in price) policy? for the Premier Support package.

Customers weren?t the only ones who received positive news about application support during OpenWorld. Oracle also announced a new integrated support program, called ?Single Stop Support? for global Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), expanding its commitment to partners by providing qualified ISVs with a focused support infrastructure and better access to Oracle engineering resources.

According to Phillips, the program will assist select solution providers to enhance customer satisfaction and shorten development cycles by enabling them to reduce the time it takes to deliver solution enhancements and establish world-class support processes.

Features of the Single Stop Support program include: Access to a dedicated Oracle support engineering team who are familiar with the partners? environment and systems; 24/7 support for Severity 1 issues; development support; environment configuration guides; best practices; change management guides; software performance reviews; software configuration assessment; and service delivery plans and review.

Announced in January 2005, Project Fusion encompasses Oracle?s move to service-oriented architecture (SOA), embedded analytics, and business process management (BPM) tools.

The new application product line intends to merge the applications of JD Edwards, Oracle, and PeopleSoft into a next-generation product suite which will feature a single-instance data model, similar to the E-Business Suite. All applications will be built using the Project Fusion tool set as well as Oracle Fusion Middleware. This application environment will consist of Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF for J2EE development but will also support third-party J2EE application servers.

Meanwhile, at the OpenWorld conference last week, Phillips announced Oracle Fusion Architecture, a standards-based technology blueprint that details the linkage between enterprise applications, middleware, and grid infrastructure technologies. Focusing on architectural integrity and openness for business applications and business information, the Oracle Fusion Architecture defines the technology components required for Fusion applications.

According to Phillips, Oracle Fusion Architecture is based on three emerging trends in the IT industry, including grid computing architecture, service-oriented architecture, and enterprise information architecture.

The components of the architecture include: Oracle Grid Infrastructure; Oracle Fusion Service Registry; Oracle Fusion Service Bus; Business Process Orchestration; Business Intelligence and Business Activity Monitoring; and a Unified Portal.

During his keynote presentation, Phillips also announced ?Hot-Pluggable? capabilities of its Oracle Fusion Middleware product family.

Phillips explained that the Hot-Pluggable capability enables customers to ?drop and deploy? Oracle Fusion Middleware products into their existing IT environments.

Oracle also unveiled Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3, a key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is designed to help organizations develop and deploy service-oriented applications (SOA) on a grid computing architecture; integrate services into enterprise business processes; and secure and manage services, applications and data in a heterogeneous environment.

Previously known as the application server stack, Oracle Fusion Middleware includes Oracle?s application server, integration tools, business intelligence, portal, development tools, identity management, data hubs, and collaboration capabilities. Although the underlying technology is different, Forrester Research says the overall middleware strategy is similar to SAP?s NetWeaver. Oracle asserts that it is open to supporting non-Oracle elements in its middleware for applications and is developing a partner program to certify integration with the stack.

According to Phillips, more than half of the 50 largest companies in the U.S., Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa use one or more components of the product family.