Oracle Cloud | Fusion Apps = power of cloud, SOA, social, mobile and big-data combined!

The niche cloud service providers have long been providing  ‘software-as-a-service’ offerings. However, standing in the way of mass enterprise-grade adoption of such offerings have been the concerns over security, inter-operability, lack of open-standards and most importantly the inability of these offerings to provide an agile enterprise architecture – an enterprise architecture that can seamlessly integrate the 3rd party cloud offerings with in-house IT assets and can orchestrate business processes that span within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.
As a result, although the enterprises have adopted some of these SaaS applications to fulfill some specific tactical and functional business needs but have never so far considered cloud as a platform for their core enterprise architecture and middleware for their critical enterprise apps. However all of this is about to change  as Oracle – one of the leading database, ERP and middleware software providers is about to fully commercialize Oracle Cloud. Before I dig deeper in to Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud Applications (Oracle Fusion Apps) I would like to point you to read this high level overview of how it’s different from its competition.
Below are the excerpts from Oracle Blog. The format changes (such as making certain sections bold) have been added on top of the original blog.
Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In
By yaldahhakim on Oct 02, 2012

Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power.
Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud.
Cloud computing is more than just consuming an “application as service”, and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn’t seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something.
Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.)
Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain.
Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way.
In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.