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City Hall, San Francisco
15 August 2006

Oracle Fusion Application Suite II

Oracle has succeeded in mollifying the critics and the customers by promising that they will give customers what they really want, a way of staying on their current platform for as long as they want and then a more or less seamless upgrade to a revolutionary new platform.

Clearly, this is what they had to do, and it is to their credit that they have tuned the message in the way they have.

But of course, there is one little question, "Can they deliver?"

To an extent not yet appreciated by most customers, the answer depends on what they're planning to do with SOA. Right now, Oracle, is saying, pretty much, that they will build a new application suite on top of the Oracle Fusion platform, and people are not yet asking what that suite will look like.

At some point or other, Oracle is going to have to say (or decide?) what they're doing. Are they building a revolutionary new application suite that exploits the capabilities of SOA to do something that renders the old ERP applications obsolete? Or are they building an evolutionary improvement to the current set of applications, a suite that incorporates the best of the best which people can upgrade to seamlessly?

Even today, 8 months after Oracle's Fusion Application Suite annoucement in City Hall, San Francisco, it's really not clear which it is. But both are beset with problems.

If Oracle is going revolutionary, at some point they will have to tell their customers (or even their own developers) just what revolutionary thing they're going to be doing with ERP. (Service-enabling is not revolutionary.) So far, they haven't, and time is running out.

If Oracle is going evolutionary, they will have to figure out some way of getting Oracle 11, PeopleSoft, and OneWorld customers to evolve, rather than rip and replace. On the face of it, this is hard, but as it turns out, it's even harder than it looks.

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This is an excerpt from our much longer Short Take on Oracle Fusion Application Suite, the second in a series of three. Short Takes are the primary product of B2B Analysts, Inc, which sells them on a yearly subscription basis.

If you are interested in reading the longer piece, please fill out our inquiry form and mention "Fusion II." We will send you a free copy as well as information about subscribing to Short Takes. For copies of older Short Takes, see our archive.

If you'd like to see our entire series on delivering value, please contact info@b2banalysts.com