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Home > Oracle Database / Applications News > Oracle's Fusion Applications: Way behind or right on track? |
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The promise of Fusion is simple -- to integrate and unify the best features found in Oracle's wide-ranging suites of applications, including applications and features from Oracle's E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel product lines. The problem is the complexity. No one has ever doubted that the Fusion vision didn't represent an astounding amount of work, and while Oracle has been cranking out Fusion-based middleware for years, Fusion Applications have been another story altogether. Wasn't 2008 supposed to be the year Oracle started rolling out Fusion Applications? The answer, it turns out, can be revealed by the surprisingly sparse -- and always vague -- public statements of direction uttered occasionally by Oracle executives to the press and in various conferences. Back in 2005, Oracle's acquisition of Siebel brought a hint of concrete Fusion Applications. Oracle President Charles Phillips said, "We will embrace Siebel's best-in-class CRM products and make the features of those products the centerpiece of our Project Fusion CRM." Phillips did not, however, reveal a timeline.
Three months later, Oracle said the new Fusion Applications would be service oriented architecture-enabled and let customers integrate with legacy systems and third-party applications. And Phillips cleared up some misconceptions over the presumed cutting and pasting of code from various enterprise resource planning product lines. "We're not merging code. We're going to take what we've learned from all those applications and build another product," he said. Halfway there?But Phillips also sent the industry into a tizzy by claiming, "Oracle is halfway to Fusion. … One year later, half the job is done and it's the toughest half." The toughest half, according to Phillips, included building the necessary tool sets, defining the platform's functionality map and getting the customers' requirements right. Was Oracle half finished with the work? Or halfway done with its timeline? Either way, Oracle said it intended to deliver the first full-fledged Fusion applications in 2008, but again, didn't offer much in terms of detail -- but Phillips also noted that customers wouldn't have to upgrade to Fusion if they didn't want to. 
Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's executive vice president of product development, says Oracle has begun to deliver the promised Fusion applications.
In February 2007, Oracle introduced WebCenter Suite and noted, "WebCenter Suite is the foundation for the user interface of Oracle Fusion Applications. Today's announcement is a both key step in the evolution of Oracle Fusion Architecture and an immediate tool for use with existing versions of Oracle Applications." Oracle did not, however, elaborate on when those Fusion Applications would rise from the primordial ooze and evolve into a shipping product. In 2007, industry concern seemed to point to the notion that Oracle customers wouldn't see a real suite of Fusion applications anytime soon -- and perhaps that Oracle was backing away from its original strategy to focus on delivering only a few Fusion apps. "We've never said that every single feature in every single application would end up in Fusion Applications. We said we'd use our existing applications as a blueprint to determine what represents the 'best of' features, and we'd concentrate on those in Fusion Applications," Phillips told InformationWeek. "But Fusion Applications will simply be an additional choice along with all of our other applications. The object model in AIA is the same one that will be used in Fusion Applications, which is a logical design, so it will make coexistence and upgrades easier for those customers that choose to go that route. But many will stay with PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS, Siebel and JD Edwards, and that's fine with us," he added. Wookey departsThen, in October, Oracle shuffled its executives around, resulting in the loss of John Wookey, the company's senior vice president of applications -- and the guy leading the Fusion Applications effort. The circumstances were unclear, which muddied the Fusion Application waters. Did Wookey's exit mean the Fusion Applications were running into problems? Gartner issued a report, "Executive Changes at Oracle Raise Questions Regarding Fusion," that both added a hint of Fusion Application intent and reiterated the fuzziness of Oracle's timelines. "Earlier this year, Oracle communicated to Gartner that version 1 of Fusion Applications, which include financial, human resources, payroll, order management, core supply chain and core CRM functions, will be released in 2008. We don't think there will be a delay in delivery, but Oracle has left enough room in its communications for a change in the breadth and depth of the initial release," Gartner wrote. Gartner's report, it should be noted, seemed to indicate a fairly robust suite of applications that Oracle believed would -- or could -- hit in 2008. At November 2007's OpenWorld conference, however, Phillips was reported as saying that new applications would start appearing, "module-by-module," beginning the following year and continuing over the next several years, coexisting with existing applications for many years to come. This was consistent with previous Oracle statements -- but definitely did not imply that Oracle could deliver the "financial, human resources, payroll, order management, core supply chain and core CRM functions" that Gartner mentioned. SFA the first Fusion appsThen, at the same conference, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison dropped a bombshell and said -- with a slight, somewhat ironic, giggle -- that a trio of Fusion-based sales force automation applications would be released in the first half of 2008. They would be based on existing Siebel tools and represent the "second generation" of sales force automation. Plus, to clear up confusion over what a Fusion-based Application actually would be, Ellison said the characteristics of a Fusion application would include being built on standards-based middleware, being service-enabled so they could easily integrate into a service-oriented architecture and being available as Software as a Service (SaaS). In June of this year, Oracle previewed Oracle Sales Prospector at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Designed to help sales professionals focus on more productive leads, Sales Prospector is built on open, standards-based technology including Oracle Fusion Middleware, the company noted. The sales productivity application is delivered via a SaaS model leveraging Oracle Grid Computing and could be used as a standalone app or to complement, and extend, first-generation CRM systems built for reporting and forecasting. What's nextAt this year's annual OpenWorld conference, Phillips glanced over Fusion Applications in his keynote address, and Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's executive vice president of product development, simply mentioned that Oracle has been building Fusion Applications. "What we mean by that is building a brand new set of applications following some basic principles," Rozwat said. "Those principles are built on industry-standard middleware, and that's why we have been so aggressive about building out our Fusion Middleware stack, also integrating new user interface technology, new business intelligence technology. So literally, it's a new experience for you through a series of applications. We've started to deliver those over this past year." The key Fusion Application Rozwat was apparently referring to is Sales Prospector, part of Oracle's Social CRM applications, which also include Oracle Sales Campaigns and Oracle Sales Library. So yes, despite any major hoopla from Oracle, the first phases of Fusion Applications are essentially here, but they are definitely peripheral applications rather than any core applications that make up an enterprise suite. In part two of our look at Oracle's Fusion Applications project, we get guidance on the future of Oracle applications from analysts, customers and Oracle itself.
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