Less than a month before Oracle's major annual Open World customer conference, the future of the company's high-profile Fusion Applications project has come into question with the news that the executive who had been leading the initiative, John Wookey, is stepping down, sources said.

Wookey, who was Oracle's senior vice president for applications development and an important voice in explaining the Fusion Applications strategy, is reportedly being replaced by Thomas Kurian, the senior vice president responsible for Oracle's Fusion Middleware product development. Kurian will reportedly head development of Oracle's middleware and applications products, reporting to Executive Vice President Chuck Rozwat, as Wookey had done.

Oracle officials yesterday declined to comment on the widespread reports of the changes. Several sources close to Oracle, however, confirmed them.

News of Wookey's departure underscored widespread speculation that Oracle may soon announce a delay or change in its Fusion Applications development program.

"I think you can expect a delay in Fusion Applications," said Ray Wang, an enterprise applications analyst at Forrester Research, in an interview with Managing Automation.

Wookey, a 12-year Oracle veteran, took over management of the company's application development teams soon after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2005, replacing Ron Wohl. He was responsible for Fusion Applications development, as well as development of Oracle's existing application products, including E-Business Suite, Enterprise, EnterpriseOne, and World. Besides promising a new enterprise applications suite in Fusion, Oracle has committed to continued support and enhancements for existing legacy products under its Applications Unlimited program. With Wookey's departure, development of existing applications will reportedly pass to his lieutenant, Ed Abbo, who will also report to Rozwat.

Fusion Applications has been seen as a make-or-break initiative for Oracle as it battles SAP AG for supremacy in the enterprise applications space. Oracle unveiled the initiative immediately after taking over PeopleSoft, describing Fusion Applications — then called Project Fusion — as a services-oriented merging of the best functionality of its existing enterprise applications. Oracle said Fusion would be ready for the market sometime in 2008.

In January 2006, Oracle provided a rare update of the Fusion Applications program, declaring that the company was halfway to achieving its development goals. At that time, Oracle said Fusion Applications would not merge the code of existing Oracle applications, but would be a new, services-based product, written in Java and incorporating the best ideas from existing Oracle applications. Oracle said that the E-Business Suite product would be the starting point for Fusion Applications' functionality and data model.

Since then, Oracle has been noticeably quiet about Fusion Applications, while continuing to enhance and support its existing suites and acquiring new applications, including Siebel, Agile, and G-Log.

"It's really impossible to know if Oracle is delaying Fusion Apps or not at this point," said Bruce Richardson, chief research officer at AMR Research. "There's really been no concrete information on Fusion since about 30 days after the launch in 2005. They talked about plans to rewrite the apps and get an uber set of functionality; then they backed off talking about it."