Today at Oracle OpenWorld Steve Miranda, Oracle SVP of applications development, announced the general availability of Oracle’s next generation of business applications, Fusion Applications. The apps are available both on-premise or as cloud hosted software-as-a-services and will have mobile versions. Customers will be able to pick and choose the apps they want to use, or use the whole suite.

Miranda also unveiled new additions to the software, including activity streams, embedded business intelligence features and features for customizing apps and even creating new apps.

Activity Streams

Each app will add changes into the activity stream – for example, new leads in CRM or new employees added to the HR app could be fed into the activity stream. The stream will also be integrated with LinkedIn and Facebook.

The activity streams feature’s most obvious analog is Salesforce.com’s Chatter, but activity streams are spreading to many enterprise applications. Microsoft revealed that it is adding activity streams to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SugarCRM has had its activity streams for years. Vendors like Qontext have also been giving enterprises the ability to embed activity streams. In other words, activity streams have been moving from an innovation to a must-have feature for enterprise software. Our Alex Williams has made the case that activity streams are the new information cortex.

Fusion PaaS

End users can personalize applications using a point and click app for building special rules, or they can customize the apps with the Groovy scripting language. Users can even build custom apps on the Fusion platform in the same way, which reminds me of Podio (see our coverage) and of course Force.com. Miranda describes the ability to do these sort of customizations as a platform-as-a-service, which certainly takes the game directly to Salesforce.com.

Embedded Business Intelligence

Miranda demoed the “embedded business intelligence” features by using an interesting example from the HCM app. Users can determine employees at risk of leaving the company – the app factors information such as long it’s been since an employee has had a raise, a promotion, etc. to determine that risk. It sounds like stuff like this will be added to all the apps. For example, here’s a look at some intelligence embedded into the CRM app:

Misc

Another interesting detail: Oracle has specialized Fusion packages for 23 different verticals.

Services Angle

There’s nothing deeply innovative here – activity streams, BI and PaaS have been done elsewhere. But these are features that put Oracle’s SaaS offerings on par with Salesforce.com, SAP and other vendors and give Oracle a real play in the public cloud. Whether these will be enough to attract new Oracle customers I’m not sure, but these are the sorts of features that Oracle needs to keep its existing customer base happy.

It’s also a big validation for activity streams, social CRM and PaaS.