Any thoughts on what's going to happen with Nexus, Siebel's composite application platform, given its similarity to Fusion Middleware?

If you look at the objectives for Nexus and Fusion, they are remarkably similar. You need to move to much more component-based architecture that allows people to extend. It's exactly the same thing. What we're really looking at is, How do we bring some of the Nexus developers on-board and try to accelerate overall the project? But they were in kind of similar points in some ways, a little further ahead in others, and a little behind in others.

I know you're not talking about merging code, but will you take some of the development work they've done over the past three or four years and bring it into Fusion?

Absolutely. A good example is one of the things we think is very important in the future is that, if you think about skinning the application, and then there's capabilities like where we're focused called a DHTML interface, which is kind of like Java scripting but is an AJAX principal, and that's a very common design pattern that we've been moving to. Microsoft has been building much more of whole rendering kit around that in Nexus, and we think that is a very attractive option that we want to have in the architecture.

So that's something that we're hoping actually that there are just some nice components that we'll reuse those. They're still in Java class libraries, so theoretically some of the stuff is still usable. But it's really the people who designed that, really what they learned in going through this process that's really what we inherit as part of this.

You talk about on-demand applications as being a big part of your business in 2010. In terms of how you're building your applications today for the future, how is that going to move you forward with on-demand?

The biggest area we focus on in terms of on-demand is this idea of superior ownership experience. We think a lot about, How do you make a more productive on-demand business? How you make a more productive on-site deployment is you have to really focus on automation—things like the configuration setup, definition process, how you orchestrate a business process and have the applications inherit that behavior. That's going to have a huge impact, and make our customers much more productive in deploying applications. And it's going to make our on-demand much more successful as well, because [users] can really fine-tune the application, even when we're running it on our premises, to an individual customer requirement.

So it's not running a separate iteration of an application for on-demand specifically?

Yes. One thing that Siebel has done is they have a separate code line around their on-demand business and they iterate very fast. That is one thing we're actually looking at. We're going to keep that code line around CRM [customer relationship management]. We're going to continue to support it. The same thing with Contact On Demand, which is a business they started last year. We're going to continue to iterate those code lines. We'll adopt the Fusion architecture, but we actually think there's a reason why they did that and why they wanted to go more quickly.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.