SAN FRANCISCO -- Despite efforts by Oracle Corp. to reassure customers of former PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications, some users expressed frustration this week with what they see as Oracle's hard sell efforts to force them to adopt its database, application server and other infrastructure products.
In a session at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle's annual customer conference here, users of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP application suite said they feared they were being forced to migrate to the Oracle infrastructure platforms and to replace IBM's WebSphere application server technology just a year after being required by JD Edwards to migrate to WebSphere.
"A year ago, JD Edwards told us it was mandatory to move to WebSphere, but now the very same people are telling us to move to the Oracle database and Oracle application server," said a JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer in the session, who requested anonymity. Other attendees of the session, entitled "Migrating JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Applications to Oracle Technology," said they felt similar fears and frustrations.
"We're being pushed to Oracle middleware," said another who also requested anonymity.
Oracle officials leading the session insisted JD Edwards customers are not being forced to adopt Oracle middleware products. "We want you to adopt Oracle technology, but we're not going to force you to," said Michael Seymour, a product manager for EnterpriseOne. Seymour noted that Oracle has pledged to continue to support the WebSphere application server product on Oracle applications at least through 2013.
Also at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle announced an initiative with IBM to enable the WebSphere products to operate as an "additional" run-time environment for Oracle's Project Fusion, an effort to combine its applications' functionality into a single enterprise suite. Oracle and IBM said they are currently discussing the initiative's scope and technical feasibility.
Oracle also said it would "evaluate" the role of IBM's DB2 database platform in Project Fusion. Oracle president Charles Phillips, however, in a separate session, said many features in Oracle's applications have been written specifically to take advantage of proprietary features in the Oracle database, making the inclusion of DB2 in Project Fusion difficult.
The announcement of the ongoing Oracle-IBM relationship did reassure some JD Edwards customers. Phil Walton, director of IT at Spirent Communications (Calabasas, CA) said he has been concerned about future Oracle support for the WebSphere portal, which his company uses. The effort by Oracle and IBM to explore including WebSphere as Project Fusion option, however, has calmed his nerves, Walton said.
"We haven't felt strong-armed at all [to migrate to Oracle middleware]. The announcement with IBM was what we were looking for. Now we can take a no-rush approach" in deciding which middleware products to use in the future, Walton said.
Despite Oracle's promises to continue to support WebSphere and to make it part of Project Fusion, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers said they felt pressure to move to Oracle middleware. They noted that, while Oracle has said that the next release of EnterpriseOne -- 8.95 -- will support the latest available version -- 10G release 2 -- of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle still has not supported the latest version of WebSphere, release 6.0.
Besides supporting the 10G version of the application server on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle this week said customers of the suite will also be able to use Oracle's Portal, Identity Management, XML Publisher and BPEL Process Manager tools.
"Oracle is falling behind on support for WebSphere. 6.0 has been out for a while," said an EnterpriseOne customer. "Why is that?"
A.J. Schifano, another Oracle marketing manager attending the session, acknowledged that the company's support for WebSphere 6.0 has lagged "much later than we had hoped." But, Schifano said, support for the latest WebSphere release had been thrown off schedule by the prolonged Oracle acquisition of Peoplesoft/JD Edwards.
Oracle officials did not offer a date for expected WebSphere 6.0 support.
EnterpriseOne customers after the session said they would feel less put-upon if Oracle would offer them a trade-in program for migrating to Oracle middleware from products from IBM or other incumbent suppliers.
Customers of other application suites acquired by Oracle -- including users of the Siebel Systems CRM applications which Oracle plans to acquire early next year -- will likely face similar decisions about migrating to Oracle middleware. Like JD Edwards, both Peoplesoft and Siebel had aligned with IBM and its middleware products, in most cases as an alternative to developing their own middleware as Oracle and SAP AG have done.
Siebel had announced an initiative -- dubbed Nexus -- to develop its own collection of service-oriented architecture middleware, leveraging WebSphere and approximating Oracle's Fusion Middleware and SAP's Netweaver. Asked yesterday about the fate of Nexus in light of Oracle's planned acquisition of Siebel, Phillips said, "We will have to dig into that. We're not sure right now."
While Oracle's move to consider making WebSphere an alternative Project Fusion platform may reassure some Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel customers, "In the long run, pressure will be there for them to move to Oracle infrastructure technologies," predicted Bob Parker, vice president at Manufacturing Insights (Framingham, MA.), an International Data Corp. research unit. "Selling Oracle databases to the installed base was a key rationale for all of these acquisitions."
Oracle officials, meanwhile, insisted that, overall, Peoplesoft and JD Edwards customers have been satisfied with their post-merger treatment. Juergen Rottler, Oracle executive vice president for support and Oracle on demand, said an Oracle-sponsored survey showed 90% of Peoplesoft and JD Edwards customers indicated satisfaction with technical and product problem response.
Rottler said the survey indicates that 75% of Peoplesoft and JD Edwards customers are not looking to switch vendors and will continue to renew support with Oracle.
In an attempt to continue to reassure those customers, Oracle this week also announced plans for what it called lifetime technical support for all of its enterprise application suites.
The company's new Lifetime Support Policy includes three levels of technical support. Premier Support includes maintenance and support -- including updates, fixes, security alerts and tax, legal and regulatory updates -- and is available for five years after a product's initial general availability date. With Extended Support, customers can extend Premier Support for three years on "select releases."
The third level, Sustaining Support, provides major product and technology updates as well as technical support and access to online technical tools. It will be available for as along as customers license Oracle software, the company said.
Oracle officials declined to make available pricing on the various support levels. Rottler, however, said the maintenance price rate for the Sustaining Support level will be the same as the Premier Support level.