Oracle unveiled a major update to its applications portfolio yesterday, launching five upgraded suites and pledging to simplify its much-criticised licensing model.

Speaking at a launch event in New York, Oracle president Charles Phillips said that alongside five major application upgrades covering suites from Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards the company would also "simplify" licensing to deliver "consistency across all solutions".

Jesper Andersen, senior vice-president of application strategy at Oracle, said that the new licensing model would cover all Oracle's different applications and deliver greater transparency and more choice to customers. " The [licensing] models [for the different apps] weren't the same, so with PeopleSoft you may buy based on the size of the company and with E-Business Suite you may buy based on number of users," he explained. "Now you can buy software using one model."

The news was welcomed by Oracle customers, many of whom have criticised Oracle's licensing strategy. "My experience of the price matrices around E-Business Suite has been a nightmare," said Chris Jones, business projects manager at Napp Pharmaceuticals. "So anything that makes [licensing] simpler is a good thing."

John Rodway, European head of Oracle Practice at IT services firm Fujitsu Services, predicted many customers would support a unified licensing scheme. " We do have customers that use PeopleSoft and Oracle and they have been saying why is licensing like that here and not here," he said.

Meanwhile, Oracle unveiled a raft of enhancements to its current application portfolio under its Applications Unlimited banner, including version 12 of its E-Business Suite designed to make it easier to manage processes across different geographies; a new edition of PeopleSoft Enterprise featuring improved talent management capabilities; an update to Siebel CRM delivering a new task-based user interface and process management functionality; and new versions of JD Edwards World and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

Phillips said each of the new suites featured enhanced integration with Oracle's standards-based Fusion Middleware layer, which meant that each of the different applications can work together more adeptly and exploit the functionality incorporated in the middleware layer, such as business intelligence and identity management capabilities.

Oracle also headed off suggestions that the launch of five new applications meant focus had shifted from delivering its Fusion suite, which promises to unify the company's various applications in a single product.

"If we talk about Applications Unlimited, rivals say we aren’t doing Fusion, and if we talk about Fusion they say we aren’t doing Applications Unlimited," said Andersen in a thinly veiled reference to arch-rival SAP. He argued that Oracle remained committed to investing in all its application lines and was already working on the next releases of its PeopleSoft and Siebel suites at the same time as remaining "100 percent committed to a next-generation application suite called Fusion"