Oracle OpenWorld, Fusion Applications and What the Future Holds

After taking a couple of days to digest Oracle OpenWorld, I thought a would provide some general thoughts from the conference.  In addition, Dan Farber has a great commentary on Larry Ellison’s keynote, Vinnie Mirchandani discusses “Oracle’s missed opportunity” and Mark Crofton reminds us of that Oracle was “Halfway to Fusion” back in 2006.

First, I commend Oracle for a well run conference and accommodating 47,000 attendees.  Lots of sessions, panels, and needless to say, Bill Joel was great.  What has become apparent to me is that even though Oracle has been investing heavily in applications, Seibel and Peoplesoft most notably, they are, more than ever, an infrastructure vendor.  I don’t want to say that applications are the “razor” and the infrastructure are the “blades”, but Fusion Middleware is the centerpiece to their monetization strategy.  It preserves the maintenance/annuity business and practically becomes a need-to-have for their applications.

The biggest takeaway for me was that Fusion applications are essentially going to be “pluggable” with existing applications.  At the HR Technology Conference last month, Naomi Bloom boldly predicted Fusion would require a completely new implementation.  Mr. Ellison’s keynote suggested that not only will they not require a new implementation, but will co-exist with all existing applications.

Mr. Ellison set the expectations very high as to the release of Fusion Applications in 2008.  Where are Fusion HCM Applications and what does the roadmap look like?   To be honest, I’m not sure if anyone knows at this point.  The good news is that unlike the changing faces at the senior levels of Fusion Applications, and in other application areas, the HCM team is stable and focused.  The question at the end of the day, though, is a changing Fusion Applications executive team going to be distracting and  will the HCM team get the priority and commitment needed to extend their advantage or be overshadowed by other applications groups such as CRM?

In case you were interested in viewing Mr. Ellison’s keynote, it can be viewed here.

November 20th, 2007