The Feature

Take Your Time, Oracle Fusion, Take Your Time

January 23, 2006 on 8:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

On the eve of the first anniversary of Oracle’s acquisition of Peoplesoft, Business Week published not one, but three articles on the subject. If you missed them, here are few excerpts. Start with the Oracle Lays Out Its Game Plan story published on January 19, 2005.

“…The Oracle CEO acknowledged that many people are worried he’s trying to make two very different corporate cultures work together – his own, known for it’s pit-bull aggressiveness, and Peoplesoft’s, best known for having a soft touch with customers. It’s a nice story for the press, Ellison says, but it’s not entirely true. “Trust me, Peoplesoft was a very, very aggressive company, or they wouldn’t have lasted in the [corporate software] business as long as they did,” he says.

He reiterated Oracle’s plans to support Peoplesoft’s products until 2013 and said his company will make no effort to nudge Peoplesoft customers toward other Oracle products, such as its database and so-called middleware software that helps big companies use their business systems over the Internet. Many Peoplesoft customers run their business software with other programs made by companies like IBM (IBM ) and BEA Systems (BEAS ). “Unless IBM should go out of business between now and then, that’s just something we can’t control,” Ellison deadpanned.

In the meantime, Oracle engineers are starting work on something dubbed “Project Fusion,” which will merge all three companies’ product lines. Customers, of course, don’t have to buy it. But Ellison believes it will offer strong technological incentive because it will be built entirely on computer programming standards such as Java and hypertext markup language (HTML). That would make the new software easier to manage and easier to connect to other, standards-based programs…”

I believe Oracle deserves benefit of a doubt, and a chance to execute their vision. I also believe they will need to change their behavior to improve their bad reputation of poor customer relationships. As for the rest of us, however, we deserve to be pessimistic. Can you remember roll-outs of Oracle Financials 11i, Oracle CRM or Oracle Order Management? Memories of those releases are still too fresh and painful to be ignored.

According to Oracle, Project Fusion is “Halfway Home”. See the Is Oracle’s Fusion Coming Together? story published on January 20.

… Oracle is not actually merging code of all of the disparate applications; rather, it’s taking the best features and ideas and rewriting the code, based heavily on Oracle’s eBusiness Suite…”…

…Oracle counters the pessimists that it’s giving customers an opportunity to ease into Fusion, by implementing certain features of the new application set in new versions of J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, and Oracle applications coming out this year…

…Meantime, SAP is planning to release a whole new application suite about a year before Fusion is complete, giving would-be clients yet another option. As for Wall Street, many still have the same impression they had a year earlier: It’s a compelling vision that could very well knock SAP on its heels, but it will be tough to pull off….”

I would love to be a fly on the wall during discussions where “best features” get selected from all different Oracle brands and products. If I were an Oracle, Peoplesoft or JD Edwards customer, I would want to make damn sure that my best people are present and heard in all strategy councils, customer advisory boards, and user groups out there.

Anyone who has ever been involved in any ERP implementation before knows how hard it is to make decisions about what and how gets implemented. It is all about making compromises. I am hopeful that Oracle has the right guy to make all interested parties reach consensus. I do not envy John Wookey one bit. I do agree he may have The Hardest Job In Silicon Valley.

… Typical of Wookey’s style was a four-hour meeting with his top staff on Jan. 4. Looking around the conference room, it was hard to tell who was in charge. Wookey didn’t sit at the head of the table, and he let others do most of the talking. As developers argued over arcane technical matters, Wookey weighed in to resolve debates — often by reminding them what customers had asked for…

There is no doubt in my mind there is any confusion at Oracle as to who is in charge. I am sure everybody is aware of who acquired whom. However, the devil is in details. Oracle will be under a lot of pressure to show results quickly. Let’s all hope they take the time to do it right and come up with better products when it’s all over.

Please provide comments or contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.