Breaking: Oracle's Andersen gone, where now for Fusion and vertical plays?

I have seen an internal Oracle email that confirms persistent rumors that Jespers Andersen, SVP Application Development at Oracle has left for Cisco. The email says:

"You may well have heard today, the rumour mill has been very busy that Jesper has resigned from Oracle.

I have been in touch and want to let you know as a group, he tells me he is going to Cisco to head up their Network Management team.

Jesper has been our executive sponsor from the start of the PDC and his decision to work through a single channel for Fusion is what made us come and work together and achieve all that we have for our respective members."

Karen Tillman from Oracle confirms Andersen's departure, noting that: "Yes, I can confirm Jesper's departure - he will be missed.  It's worth noting that Jesper was not part of the Fusion development team (which reports to Chuck Rozwat), and that our Fusion plans remain on track."

In theory this casts a shadow over Fusion because internally to Oracle, Andersen was always thought of as 'Mr. Fusion.'  Whether this is the case or not is a moot point. At the Q4 2008 earnings call, a question on the progress of Fusion was passed to Larry Ellison, CEO who said:

I think no change in terms of our schedules. So we have actually launched some Fusion applications already. We have launched a variety of CRM applications based on Fusion technology. They are available as Software as a Service. Maybe the most interesting one is one called Sales Prospector, which offers a capability not available with Salesforce.com. Specifically, it data mines your installed base and tells you what product you should be selling to that customer next and who your best references are for selling that product. So we have got a whole second generation set of CRM products to make salespeople more productive versus the first generation, which really was to help managers do a better job forecasting their sales. So those Fusion technology based applications are actually already in the marketplace.

We will continue to deliver Fusion technology applications until ultimately we have a Fusion version of every application that we sell but it will take some time before we get all the way through all the different applications that we offer. But the big -- there will be a suite of Fusion applications coming out this year, next year and the year after.

In light of this latest development and the near radio silence on progress this is how I'm reading it:

• Fusion is happening but not at the pace Oracle originally thought.
• Coming as it does just before Oracle Open World, the story will be spun so that new releases will be branded as Fusion, regardless of whether they're new or something else.
• Vertical market plays, on which Oracle was pinning a lot of hope are up in the air.

Some of the Irregulars are meeting with Oracle this week. It should make for an interesting conversation.