Ellison set to outline Oracle Fusion
I'm at the San Francisco City Hall, where Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and team are getting set to provide an update on the Fusion roadmap. Fusion, as described by Oracle President Charles Phillips in one of the white papers available at the event, takes "the best ideas about high productivity and the total ownership experience from PeopleSoft, and the industry expertise and midmarket experience from JD Edwards, and merges those competitive differentiators with Oracle's own industry-leading breakthroughs in technologies like business process management, Java, XML, and Web services." Phillips goes on to say, "The result will be a revolutionary, new, service-oriented, Java-based architecture for enterprise software that will deliver superior ownership experience, scalable business process automation, metadata capabilities, built-in business intelligence, and industry-specific capabilities--not to mention the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) of any software vendor, bar none." And, current customer investments in data will be protected, and "no disruptions that will erode your investment."
It's the buzzword, SOA, Java kumbaya enterprise software song, similar to what the other enterprise software vendors are claiming to deliver. Competitors call it "ConFusion" -- and Fusion is still two years away from completion. I don't expect much in the way of news, other than the continued effort to keep customers in the fold (away from SAP, especially) with more information and to tout pre-Fusion deliverables based on Oracle Fusion Middleware.
More to come. Unfortunately, the San Francisco City Hall isn't Wi-Fi enabled...