Fusion Apps Are Coming, Fusion Apps Are Coming…..
Want to know where the entire enterprise software industry will be looking in mid-Nov.? It’s easy: Oracle’s OpenWorld user conference. Why? That’s easy too: Oracle is going to be showing off the first of its Fusion Applications at its annual show, and I assure you, the whole (enterprise software) world will be watching.
The slow emergence of Fusion Apps from the labs and hype machines into reality began this spring, with a rebranding effort that took Siebel’s much-hyped analytics and turned them into Fusion Analytics. But what Oracle promises to be showing next fall is new code and new functionality, which is what its Fusion Apps have always promised to be.
While I have it straight from the horse’s mouth (John Wookey, head of Oracle’s apps efforts, whom I accused in a rumor of my own making of actually being a nice guy), I don’t have any real details on what’s going to be shown next fall. But allow me to speculate, first on what won’t be in the demo at OpenWorld, and then what could be the mix come November.
No PLM – that codebase, acquired when Oracle bought Agile, is way too new to be part of Fusion Apps 1.0.
No Hyperion – same problem. There just hasn’t been enough time to get this into the Fusion Apps code.
No Transportation Management (G-log): Though this acquisition is almost two years old, Oracle hasn’t fully integrated it into the Fusion Middleware stack, and therefore, I believe, won’t be putting it into version 1.0 of Fusion Apps either.
No i-Flex: While financial services in general is a hot topic for Oracle, the i-Flex products are too industry specific to make into what is supposed to be a mostly horizontal platform.
And here’s some guesses into what will be there:
CRM: It’s hard to imagine that version 1.0 won’t have lots of CRM in it. Why? Many of the most interesting business services that can benefit from a SOA approach need strong CRM. And Siebel, the core of Oracle’s CRM, was already pretty far down the road with its own SOA/Modeling plans. So count CRM in, in a big way.
Retek: While this looked like a vertical play for the retail market, think of how many other verticals have a retail component: Oil and gas (gas stations), health care (pharmacies), banking and insurance (branch offices and brokers), and telcos (retail shops), among others. I vote for Retek as part of the initial Fusion 1.0.
Core ERP, HRMS, and Finance: These are basic commodities that are checklist items in any suite, and Oracle will put them there to make sure that Fusion 1.0 is a suite, and not just a narrow-based set of applications.
More? There’s one issue I’ll straddle the fence on for now, mostly because I can’t make up my mind: Supply chain management (Demantra). While this is a hot-spot for cross-business service functionality, insofar as the supply chain can always benefit from more/better/faster processes, I can’t honestly make up my mind whether it will be part of version 1.0 or not. On the one hand, I think it’s an early candidate from a cross-industry standpoint, on the other hand the SCM story is so much more complete when you add PLM, which I definitely don’t see coming soon. So I’ll leave this one out for now, and revisit it once I hear a little more.
In the end, Oracle’s success with Applications Unlimited and its recent AIA integration release has greatly diminished the need to make Fusion 1.0 a show-stopping, industry-altering, paradigm-shifting…. you get the picture. The company’s current financial status gives it the luxury to make Fusion Apps 1.0 a solid base hit, without the need for a home run. That, I believe, is very possible. And Oracle will be fine with its incremental steps, as long as one of its competitors doesn’t hit one out of the ball park in the mean time.