Oracle Fusion Apps: Mixed Messages on Much-Hyped Suite

For the better part of five years, Oracle’s enterprise applications customers have heard all about the vision for Oracle’s Fusion Applications suite: a mammoth engineering and development project to unite its legacy enterprise apps—using some mysterious middleware Pixie Dust—and give every customer a chance to come forward onto a brand-new, “next generation” platform.

During those five years of hype and hope, it always seemed that Oracle’s Fusion Apps development team was “halfway to completion.” Wait, I thought that’s what you said in 2007?

No doubt, the vision sounded good. But during the latter part of the past couple of years, when things got lean for companies, most of Oracle’s base was still intent on cajoling more life from their aging PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite and Siebel legacy apps. (Just like those drivers who proudly boast of 200,000 miles on their Toyota Camrys.)

So who really needed to hear about “next generation” when “this generation” was still working—warts and all? Not surprisingly, many Oracle customers have been a bit weary of Fusion Apps. (Oracle, by the way, runs a single instance of Oracle E-Business Suite. I wonder what their upgrade plans are?)

At Oracle’s OpenWorld 2010 show on Sunday night, CEO Larry Ellison offered a “preview” of Fusion Apps news that was to be announced, in more detail, throughout the event in San Francisco.

Another year, another preview, it felt like.

Ellison poured the Fusion Apps Kool-Aid while pointing out the “degree of difficulty” in creating them: 100 “information age” apps available when it goes generally available, the largest release ever for Oracle; apps available on-premise or via the cloud; a modern service-oriented architecture; a user interface that looks more like Facebook than E-Business Suite; and a standardized middleware infrastructure entirely written in Java for all Fusion Apps (and this is important when you consider that, for example, PeopleSoft and Siebel have their own middleware).

Oracle’s CEO did all this, ironically, by assailing Oracle’s very own “older, first-generation ERP systems” and their “old-fashion architecture.” (Oh, that stuff! That’s total crap!) Ellison also took shots at the cloud players today: Salesforce.com, Taleo, Workday, SuccessFactors and SAP’s Business ByDesign.

But for all of Oracle’s excitement around Fusion Apps—and Ellison was excited, though not as pumped up as when he was talking about his prized Exalogic Elastic Cloud databases—Ellison offered a rather curious sales pitch: Ellison almost gave permission for his customers to keep their old stuff and not buy Fusion Apps when it’s finally GA.

When he rhetorically asked if all Oracle customers should invest in Fusion Apps ASAP, he responded: “No, absolutely not…. You can move to Fusion at the time of your choosing. Over the next five years, at some point, we think you’ll move to Fusion.”

Wait? Did I suddenly get transported to BizzaroOpenWorld? Get excited about Fusion Apps, but don’t expect your Oracle rep to shove it down your throat. But it’s definitely ready. Don’t worry.

And five years seems like an eternity—especially when those competitors Ellison mentioned continue to (slowly) upend the business applications marketplace.

Ellison noted that dozens of customers helped Oracle with the testing, feedback and user-interface development of Fusion Apps. Their logos appeared on screen next to Ellison during his keynote as some type of validation.

But even with all the intrigue, those Oracle customers who were not part of the Fusion Apps development will most likely take a “wait and see attitude” toward Fusion Apps. That’s what officials from two Oracle user groups (the UK User Group and the Oracle Applications User Group) told a gathering of Oracle customers, analysts and other industry watchers during a meeting on Sunday at OpenWorld, which I attended.

In addition, preliminary results from a survey of more than 100 Oracle customers by Computer Economics demonstrate that reluctance: “Oracle has its work cut out for itself in selling its product roadmap. Fusion Apps are not on the radar for most Oracle Apps customers,” writes Frank Scavo, who’s managing the survey, on his blog. Only 25 percent of E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft customers are considering a migration to Fusion, he notes.

That’s not surprising. First, given Fusion Apps “history,” any CIO, CEO or CFO has to ask: What value can Fusion Apps add to my company that I’m not getting from my PeopleSoft or Siebel app right now? (We’re still not sure what Fusion Apps will cost.) Second, CIOs have made it clear in surveys that they don’t just want to be sold more software; they want their vendors to help solve their business problems. And third, they’re probably suffering from “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” syndrome, due to Fusion Apps’ starts and stops.

Oh, and one more thing: Oracle Fusion Apps is still not quite ready for prime time. Ellison announced a semi-vague general-availability date in late December or early 2011.

“More than five years later,” Ellison proclaimed during his keynote, “we’re finally there.”

Well, almost.

Thomas Wailgum covers Enterprise Software, Data Management and Personal Productivity Apps for CIO.com. Follow him on Twitter @twailgum. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline. E-mail Thomas at twailgum@cio.com.