Oracle's Fusion faces knotted challenge

Oracle's sweeping Project Fusion vision dominated the company's message at its OpenWorld user conference last week, but skepticism abounds about the ambitious plan. Fusion is a new, Java-based applications line merging the best features from Oracle's numerous acquired applications.

Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld

Oracle President Charles Phillips noted that Fusion will not merge the code bases of Oracle's E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek, and, soon, Siebel applications. Rather, the company will build from scratch the new line, to which customers can migrate at their own pace. The first Fusion apps are set for a 2008 release.

"We can't take anything away if we expect people to upgrade. It's got to be a superset," Phillips said about the functionality customers can expect from Project Fusion applications.

Analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the Fusion strategy is growing more complex with each Oracle acquisition.

"It's a complicated task," Greenbaum said. "I think Siebel just made it significantly more complex at a relatively late date."

"Ask Microsoft how hard it is," Greenbaum added, referring to Microsoft's protracted development of a new applications suite, Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Project Green), to unify its own collection of acquired ERP apps.

Oracle customer Debra Lilley, principal business solutions consultant at Fujitsu, said she would like to see Oracle release integration technologies sooner than Project Fusion's launch.

"We've made a significant investment in [Oracle and Siebel], so if they are going to be more aligned, that's to our good," Lilley said.