SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Corp. is ahead of its announced three-year schedule to develop and roll out a new set of enterprise applications that will tap the functionality of the company's various home-grown and acquired application suites, Co-President Charles Phillips said yesterday.
In a meeting with customers, analysts, and press on the anniversary of the company's initial strategy roadmap announcement following its acquisition of PeopleSoft, Phillips declared that Oracle is now halfway to its goal of creating a services-oriented, standards-based successor set of enterprise applications. Phillips, however, stopped short of announcing a new deadline -- the company originally announced a 2008 date -- for delivering the new applications, initially dubbed Project Fusion. The initiative will now be called Fusion Applications, Phillips said.
In response to questions from Managing Automation, Phillips said Oracle has considered accelerating the public deadline for delivering Fusion Applications, "But I don't want to put additional pressure" on developers, Phillips said.
The Fusion Applications initiative is the lynchpin of a high-stakes bet Oracle has made to grow in the enterprise applications market through the acquisition last year of PeopleSoft and the pending purchase of Siebel Systems Inc. In a bid to hang onto current customers, Oracle has promised to continue supporting and extending existing versions of its E-Business Suite (EBS), as well as applications it acquired from PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. The company has also promised the Fusion Applications, which it describes as a superset of functionality from those existing systems.
A year ago, on January 18, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Project Fusion would "merge the features and function of the JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Oracle products." Yesterday, Phillips clarified Oracle's approach.
He said the Fusion Applications will not be composed of merged code from existing applications. Rather, he said, Oracle is combining the best concepts and core functionality from existing applications, but coding much of the Fusion Applications from scratch in Java.
"We are not merging code," Phillips said. "This is a new product. We will take what we learned from the other applications, but this is a new product."
Oracle will make use of some existing Java code from its E-Business Suite. Sixty percent of EBS is written in Java today. But the bulk of Fusion Applications code, he stressed, will be new.
"No one would have guessed we'd have made as much progress as we have made," Phillips said. "We've made incredible progress, and we are ahead of schedule."
Phillips and other Oracle officials said the company has spent the first year of the Fusion project learning the functionality of its existing Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications and gathering additional requirements from customers.
Where existing Oracle applications take different approaches to providing the same functionality, Oracle has worked out how to "harmonize" those approaches, said John Wookey, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. And Oracle has begun to define and build the set of Web services from which the Fusion Applications will be composed.
In three months, Wookey said, Oracle plans to release a registry where current customers can access Fusion Applications Web services and information about process flows that will eventually be built into Fusion Applications. This, he said, will help customers understand how they might integrate their existing Oracle applications with Fusion Applications.
Oracle also has built a tool that will allow current customers to catalog extensions they have made to existing Oracle applications and discover whether those extensions are supported natively in the new products.
Oracle also has begun to build a data model for Fusion Applications that will incorporate important concepts and data types from existing Oracle Applications, said Steve Miranda, senior vice president for financial applications development at Oracle. The starting point for the Fusion Applications data model, Miranda said, was the Oracle E-Business Suite data model. But it has been extended with concepts from the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products.
For example, the Fusion Applications data model will include "trees," a concept used in the PeopleSoft Enterprise suite to model organizational structures. The Fusion Applications data model definition has essentially been completed, officials said.
And Oracle has launched a project -- dubbed Swan -- to bring graphical user interface design concepts from the PeopleSoft applications to the Fusion Applications, Miranda said.
Oracle officials also demonstrated an upgraded version of its JDeveloper development environment, which will be the unified tool for extending Fusion Applications and building composite applications out of Fusion and existing Oracle applications. The tool, 10G Release 3, includes support for the BPEL business process modeling language standard.
The accomplishment of these initiatives, Phillips said, means that Oracle is halfway to its goal of producing the Fusion Applications. He also noted that the functional definition work that Oracle has completed "was the tough half."
Oracle officials, however, acknowledged that the company still faces plenty of work before the Fusion Applications are complete and ready for adoption. For one thing, the company must convince customers to upgrade to recent releases of their existing Oracle applications in order to be eligible to move to Fusion Applications.
PeopleSoft customers, for example, would need to be on version 8.8 or 8.9 of the Enterprise applications in order to be eligible to migrate directly to Fusion Applications.
Oracle's goal, Phillips said, is for 80% of existing customers to be on current releases and eligible to upgrade directly to Fusion Applications once they become available.
Oracle also must develop a business case compelling enough to convince customers to move to Fusion Applications. Wookey, in response to a question from Managing Automation, acknowledged that Oracle has not yet made that case. That's because, he said, the company and its customers still do not have a handle on what it will cost customers to migrate to the new set of applications.
Meanwhile, speaking at the AMR Research Inc. conference yesterday in Half Moon Bay, CA, SAP's Product & Technology Group President Shai Agassi charged that Oracle's Fusion Applications plan cannot work.
"Oracle can't put together code from four or five or 11 acquisitions," Agassi said. "It's impossible. Now they say they are not copying code, just ideas."
Separately Agassi said that SAP will be announcing a software-as-a-service -- or on-demand -- product this quarter, believed to be in the customer relationship management space. The product will take the form of a "hybrid" offering, Agassi said, meaning customers will have the option of bringing it on premises if they choose.
Editor-in-Chief David R. Brousell contributed to this story.