A guest post by Chris Leone, Senior Vice President, Oracle Applications Development

Monday morning in downtown San Francisco - lots of sunshine, plenty of traffic, and sidewalks chocked full of people with fresh faces and blister free feet. Let the week of Oracle OpenWorld begin!

For a great Applications start, Chris Leone packed the house with his Fusion Applications overview session - he covered strategy, scope, roadmaps, and customer successes.

Fusion Apps, the world's best SaaS suite, is built on 100 percent standards. Chris talked about its information driven user experience, its innovative design, and the choice of deployment. People can run Fusion in the cloud, in a managed / hosted environment, or on premise -- or they can use a combination of these three models. About seventy percent of our customers go with SaaS.

Release 5 of Fusion Apps will become available soon. The cadence of releases will be three times a year. The key drivers are to accelerate business success (no rip and replace) and to simplify business processes.

Chris told the audience that organic Fusion is the centerpiece of our cloud solutions, rounded out with acquired offerings such as Taleo Recruiting and RightNow Customer Service. From the cloud solutions, customers can expect real time and predictive BI, social capabilities, choice of deployment, and more productivity because of a next generation UX called FUSE. Chris's demo showed a super easy, new UI that touts self service navigation. We'll blog about FUSE in the very near future.

Chris said the next 365 days of Fusion Apps would include more localization, more industries, more power, more mobile, and more configurability. The audience was challenged to think hard about how Fusion could be part of their three-to-five year plans. Chris set up a great opportunity for you to follow up with your customers as they explore the possibilities.