Oracle Corp. (ORCL) partially lifted the veil on its next generation suite of business applications, dubbed Fusion, Wednesday, and talked about the database and software giant's increasing interest in "cloud" technologies.

Fusion is the name for a number of business software tools which tie together the best technologies from the numerous acquisitions Oracle has made in recent years.

Oracle has been working on the project for over four years, since the Redwood City, Calif., company completed its $10.3 billion acquisition of Peoplesoft Inc., a human relations software company it bought in 2005.

Over the past five years, Oracle has spent well over $30 billion acquiring companies to build out its portfolio of business tools.

"It's a big project and we've been working on it for a long time," Oracle's Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison, said at a user conference for Oracle customers in San Francisco Wednesday, as he showed demos of the tools. Ellison said that the applications were "code ready," meaning the software was essentially ready to ship but was being tested and checked for bugs. The applications would launch in 2010, he said.

Though it is unclear exactly how much the launch of Fusion will contribute to Oracle's revenues, its release is regarded by analysts as a significant potential revenue driver. Oracle charges a one-time fee for initial purchase of a software package and offers subsequent maintenance contracts on its products.

Ellison said Fusion would include updates to some existing Oracle products in areas such as sales ledger. But Oracle was also branching out into new areas, such as "talent management," which helps human resources workers figure out the best staff to perform particular roles, or "territory management," assigning sales staff to appropriate geographic territories.

Fusion will also be available on an off-premise or "cloud" basis, Ellison said.

Oracle's new-found commitment to including "cloud" or hosted computing functionality into its products is striking, given Ellison's strongly expressed skepticism about it in the past, and underscores the growing centrality of the technology.

Many software companies are experimenting with cloud computing, a broad term for a shift towards paying for technology on a subscription basis, storing information on large servers and accessing the data via the Internet. But just last September, Ellison described the trend as "gibberish" and expressed skepticism as to whether companies could make a profit from cloud computing. More recently he has softened his view, launching some "cloud" based products.

Oracle also previewed a new set of tools Wednesday which would allow remote diagnostics to be completed on customers systems, based partly on comparing the performance of their software with other customers.

Ellison, in several public appearances during the week, has talked enthusiastically about Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA), a server and storage maker, in a $7.4 billion deal.

At the user conference, Ellison has been working hard to convince Sun's customers that Oracle, which is moving into the hardware business for the first time in a significant way through the acquisition, will continue to develop and support Sun's products.

The deal has been held up by European anti-trust regulators, who have expressed concern that the deal could lessen competition in the database market.

-By Jessica Hodgson, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6455; jessica.hodgson@dowjones.com