Happy anniversary, Oracle, Siebel, “Applications Unlimited!”

Exactly one year after high-profile Oracle completed the highest-profile of all its high-profile acquisitions, the big guys announced the general availability of Oracle’s Siebel CRM Release 8. The announcement was perhaps the biggest of the general media blitz Oracle perpetuated during the "Applications Unlimited" event held on six continents over 24 hours on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday.

Back in January 2006, Oracle president Charles Phillips stated upon completion of the hee-yuge $5.85 billion deal that "Siebel’s expertise with industry-specific customer-facing applications combined with rich analytics will […] serve as the centerpiece of our CRM strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications…” The “Applications Unlimited” event, then, could be looked upon as the first day in the rest of Oracle’s business life.

Siebel 8 is promised to provide comprehensive support for Service-Oriented Architectures and for non-Oracle technology such as IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, SQL Server 2005 and IBM DB2. Much ballyhooed, too, is the first-time Siebel support for Linux.

Siebel 8 includes “extensive enhancements” for oft-used products Siebel Sales, Siebel Enterprise Marketing, Siebel Customer Order Management, Siebel Contact Center and Service, Siebel Universal Customer Master and Siebel Self Service and eBilling applications; the product will be touted in public sector, communications, utilities, life sciences, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, high-technology, automotive goods, and consumer packaged goods industries. (Did Oracle PR leave anything out there?)

Said biggest of big guys, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, last year right about this time: “Oracle is now the undisputed leader in Customer Relationship Management software.” At that time, it may have been a bit of boasting. Perhaps one year later, we’ll see if Oracle’s a leader in innovation or if the self-proclaimed “world’s largest enterprise software company” is only really good at buying companies.

Of course, Siebel CRM wasn’t the only product to get the limelight, as the company released a virtual “what’s what” of the Oracle line: New to the world are Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, and JD Edwards World A9.1.

“These releases are proof that Oracle is delivering on its strategy to protect and extend customers’ current investments in Oracle’s leading horizontal, specialty and industry suites," said Phillips. Again, um, perhaps we should wait and see just how well these things work…

“Applications Unlimited” also played host to an outlining of Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle’s next-generation application suite. The Oracle Fusion Applications set was once again described as “designed to be the industry’s first, complete standards-based, SOA built application suite.”

Finally, Oracle also announced in the midst of the blitz that the company will expand its partner program with services for ISVs integrating other product to Oracle applications using good old Oracle Fusion Middleware as a standards-based technology to integrate disparate applications.

Oracle was also celebrating the first anniversary of the "Applications Unlimited" program itself this week, and company representatives reported that some 300 ISVs have initiated or completed integrations with one or more of Oracle’s application lines.