The Feature

Best Oracle Fusion “Halftime” Commentary Yet

February 20, 2006 on 10:12 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I have posted several references to the “Oracle Fusion – Half Way There” press conference news reports and articles before, but the I Pity The Fool commentary by Newmerix’s CTO Neil Robertson is the best one yet. Neil Robertson has provided an excellent, exhaustive (honestly, who has time to write a 5,379 word analysis?) educational, and entertaining essay about Oracle Fusion by pretending to be writing a press conference report. If you have anything to do with Oracle Applications, this one is a must reading!

Here is my favorite part:

…John Wookey: “We looked at the all the applications we had [PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE, and Siebel] and took the best requirements from each. We’re rewriting applications based on these requirements.”

Basically they realized they had four of everything and decided to rebuild a fifth from scratch. At first blush, this seems to make a ton of sense. Many have claimed that Oracle bought Siebel because of their recent prowess in industry specific process and features. Why shouldn’t they take that proprietary IP and work it into Fusion? But hang on, take a deeper look. Think through the reality of what this means to a customer trying to move to Fusion. Most likely, a lot but not all of your current application’s features will be present. Well, what do you do if your business process depends heavily on something that Oracle decided didn’t make the cut? You have two choices: “change your business process (and retrain your staff on how to use it) or, guess what, customize the Fusion application! We’re totally back to square one again.