Customer Road To Oracle Fusion Likely To Be A Long One

Wednesday Oracle CEO Larry Ellison finally took the wraps off Fusion, a collection of more than 100 applications designed to serve as an upgrade path for users of Oracle's E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications.

The applications will be available to select customers late this year and be generally available in the first quarter of 2011. The set includes applications for financials, CRM, human resource management, supply chain management, procurement and more. Ellison said only the manufacturing applications wouldn't be ready when the rest of the Fusion suite ships.

But with Oracle promising to continue developing and supporting its current-generation applications for a long time, customers will likely take their time upgrading to Fusion.

"It's a potential game-changer," said Uday Tembulkar, head of business development for Oracle services at Oracle Partner Patni Computer Systems, speaking of Fusion. But like most Oracle partners interviewed for this story, Tembulkar said it would likely be years before Oracle application owners fully upgrade to the new application set. "I don't think anybody's in any hurry to migrate."

Customers seem more focused on moving up to the latest versions of current Oracle products, such as the recently introduced E-Business Suite Release 12, and middleware such as the Oracle SOA Suite in preparation for eventually adopting Fusion, said GK Murphy, executive vice president at Sierra Atlantic, another Oracle partner.

Still, the formal debut of Fusion was a watershed for Oracle, which began developing the applications in early 2005 shortly after it completed its acquisitions of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards in December 2004. "We've been working on building Fusion applications for a very, very long time," Ellison said in his Wednesday keynote at Oracle OpenWorld.

A major impetus for the Fusion project was the need to develop applications that used the best features of its older applications, but run on Oracle Fusion Middleware, Ellison said. The software also has built-in social collaboration capabilities.

Another design principle was the need to build business intelligence into the applications and help organizations use the software to make better decisions. "This was not going to be a clerk automation system," Ellison said.

A critical aspect of Fusion is that the applications will run either on-premise or as Software-as-a-Service using the same code base. Ellison contrasted that approach with SAP, whose Business ByDesign on-demand applications are a separate product line from the company's on-premise applications.

"It's a mistake to offer separate on-premise and SaaS applications," Ellison said, taking a dig at Oracle's enterprise application archrival.

Partners Played Critical Development Roles

A number of Oracle partners, IT services companies and systems integrators have been working closely with Oracle, in some cases helping to develop the Fusion products. Cognizant co-developed a tool for migrating data from Siebel CRM to the Fusion CRM application, for example, while Sierra Atlantic co-developed the Fusion distributed order orchestration application.

Oracle partners like Cognizant, Patni Computer Systems and Tata Consultancy Service have been beta testing Fusion products for months, even years, under the Fusion Strategic Rampup Partner initiative. "One of the smart things [Oracle] has been doing is making a huge effort to work with their partner ecosystem," said Peter Grambs, Cognizant Senior Vice President, Customer Solutions Practice.

The ability to mix on-premise and Software-as-a-Service applications will be a key Fusion capability, Grambs said. "There's a strong expectation that it's going to be easier to integrate cloud and on-premise."

But perhaps more important, Fusion's component-based modularity will make it easier to gradually upgrade from Oracle's E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications over time, rather than undertake huge, disruptive deployment projects, said Gramb.

Still, he said Cognizant is already seeing some interest in Fusion. "I think it's going to be very well received in the marketplace."

Ellison himself recognized that customer adoption of Fusion would be a long process. In his opening keynote speech Sunday, he told Oracle OpenWorld attendees that Oracle will continue to support the E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards products "for years to come."

"You can move to Fusion at a time of your choosing," he said.