Ellison stressed the benefits of the modular approach. "You assemble the components in the order you want to use them, in the order that makes sense for your industry," he said.

Oracle has worked "very, very closely" with customers to design and test Fusion Applications, work that has resulted in a superior user interface, Ellison said.

Embedded BI is another major focus of the suite. "You can't use the system without using business intelligence," Ellison said.

In a demonstration, a pair of Oracle executives showed how the system alerted one user that a particular shipment had been delayed. The application allowed the user to bring up a dashboard showing which order manager was responsible for the particular transaction, and then begin an instant-messaging conversation with him directly from the tool. In turn, the order manager was able to search for less critical orders and reroute them to fulfill the first one.

"We tell you what you need to know, what you need to do, and we tell you how to do it," Ellison said.