Oracle Cools on Fusion, Focuses on Current ERP

Published: February 8, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Oracle unveiled major new releases of four out of its five application lines last week. The software giant also backed off a bit on Fusion, its next-generation unified ERP platform, as it emphasized how responsive and flexible it's being to its customers' near-term needs.

It might be a stretch to call it a "kinder, gentler" Oracle, but there was an unmistakable shift in the software giant's rhetoric last week as it unveiled J.D. Edwards World A9.1, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9.0, and Siebel Release 8.0--and talked about customer adoption of J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, which it launched last year.

The difference was, instead of talking about how great the next-generation Fusion ERP products will be and how it will benefit customers who take the gamble (and ERP migrations are always gambles), Oracle talked about how important the feedback from its customers was in shaping the new releases, and how much customers will benefit from the upgrades now. Collectively, Oracle refers to the new focus on existing products as its "Applications Unlimited" initiative.

During a 90-minute Webcast last week, John Wookey, Oracle's applications chief, acknowledged that Fusion ERP was making customers nervous. "We're not going to drive a bunch of customers to technology they're not ready for, but rather take the technology we're using to develop Fusion applications, and . . . bring that back to products they're actually running today."

It may be a slight change, but it's refreshing, nonetheless, to hear Oracle sounding more like a customer-driven application developer than the uncompassionate decider of thousands of companies' technology futures, which is how it came across to many J.D. Edwards shops last year. Oracle finally got the message that they were unsure about Fusion ERP, and so it changed its rhetoric. Whether that rhetoric about giving customers more choices trickles down deeply into policy--say, by supporting the iSeries and DB2/400 as a database layer within Fusion ERP, which the company is still mum on--will be determined in the future.

That doesn't mean Fusion is dead. The Fusion middleware layer is still very much alive, even while Oracle tapers off on its Fusion application rhetoric just a bit for now. Oracle, like all of the other big ERP software companies that have gobbled up smaller ERP companies, has established a middleware layer to ease the integration process and open up existing applications, such as World, to other applications, such as business intelligence. Oracle eventually wants to deliver just one flavor of middleware across all ERP stacks rather than have several platform-specific versions. This is largely a good thing, as it increases the breadth and depth of capabilities available to legacy ERP products, while lowering the delivery costs.

Oracle also made a splash last week around EnterpriseOne. Despite Oracle's insistence that it achieved something incomparable in the industry by simultaneously launching major upgrades of five product lines, it was really just four, since EnterpriseOne 8.12 shipped 10 months ago. (And in fact, when you consider that World A9.1 is months away from availability, it's really only three.)

According to Oracle's announcement, EnterpriseOne shops that have made the move to version 8.12 include Amarr, Centre Vinicole Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte, Developers Diversified Realty Corporation, HarperCollins Publishers, Land O'Lakes, Pernod Ricard, Saneco Group, SKOPE Industries Ltd., Sound Transit, and Valley Crest.

Cold Fusion

While last week's focus was on the "Applications Unlimited" release--which refers to the five ERP and CRM suites Oracle sells now as opposed to the Fusion ERP software it will sell in the future--Wookey couldn't help from going back to the future near the end of his presentation.

Then Wookey went on to say why it's still the goal to move customers to Fusion. "Why are we developing Fusion?" To improve customer's businesses. "It's the same mission we've always had. At some point in the future, the next generations of applications are going to become important to them."

"There is a change coming in this marketplace. Every five to 10 years, there are changes in application architecture," he says. "There is a change coming in SOA and standards-based middleware."

This goes to the heart of what Oracle is doing with Fusion. Currently, Fusion middleware exists externally to the five core applications. But when Fusion ERP finally ships, the middleware layer won't be external to the applications anymore. "It's middleware inside the applications as we design them," Wookey says. And that inevitably will become a major advantage as SOA and Web services gain more traction in enterprise IT.

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot