Project Fusion - Some Thoughts

The Challenge - Downside of a purchased customer base.

Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft - JDEdwards and Siebel creates big challenges for it in terms of continued support and enhancements for the acquired customers and their retention.
Current Customers have to be assured their investments are safeguarded and they continue to benefit from technology upgrades. New Customers expect to get the perceived benefits from deciding to invest with Oracle and hope the acquisitions would not weaken Oracle's potential to support its customers as a result of integration issues.

Oracle has announced many such initiatives like life time support for its major product lines, release of next version of PeopleSoft which would strategically wean straying customers back to its fold and demonstrate its commitment for the products.

From Oracle's point of view continued support and enhancement of a heterogeneous product mix (differing features, architectures and development tools) does not make economic sense in the long run. It would love to see acquired customers slowly moving onto its flagship products without the associated pain.(migration, retraining employees, business process re-engineering et al.,)

The Solution

Project fusion is the Killer Application (if viewed as an application) which will anaesthetise the rigors of a migration or integration exercise of newly acquired customers and also fills large gaps within Oracle's E Business Suite and other flagship products. From a broad architectural perspective Project Fusion is a blue print for deploying and managing enterprise information systems with next generation technologies. 7 days into PeopleSoft's acquisition Oracle started a comparative study of the best features in all the products aimed at fusing the best features into a single product. The result of this and other studies within Oracle laid their strategy and direction for Project Fusion.

So what does project fusion (PF) mean to Oracle's Project Fusion visionaries ?
'Its a blue print for your business and how all the suite of applications fit together' - 'Its a blue print of how you think about existing applications' - Quite high level for us to really mean anything.

I will try to provide a simplified view of what PF is made of and what it can do for us.

At this point the core of project fusion - looked from an application perspective is MIDDLEWARE - a suite of middleware applications or middleware backbone which support Portal technology, Security, Business Intelligence and Business Process mapping. Some of the buzzwords you hear concomitant to the PF noise are SOA- service oriented architecture, XML Publisher, BAM - Business Activity Monitoring (operational dash boards) and BPEL.

Oracle cites that it successfully integrated Oracle Financials 11.5.10 with Retek's retail solution using Project Fusion. The advantage therefore with Project Fusion is your
a. Integrations are much easier and rely on proven and tested SOA architecture
b. Upgrades are painless in that existing core applications like HR need not be upgraded when making add-ons For Eg., A Supply Chain Management solution is to be integrated.

It would slowly evolve into a single application suite ( might carry a new name and branding )with the business application modules (having the best features of all the acquired products), middleware and database bundled as a single offering.

What does this mean for the developer's and the consultants ?

Oracle has moved far ahead on the Java platform and its future offerings will be java- centric. Oracle is also urging its customers and the developer community to adapt to java in a big way. Project fusion leverages Oracle's investments in the Java platform and will lead oracle's efforts to streamline and consolidate all of its product range for the Java Platform. Project Fusion will be the beginning of a major paradigm shift in the way we work and think. There is an urgent need for upfront investment of time, money and effort to reskill oneself onto the Java Platform. So the wake up call for loyal Oracle Only Consultants is here. JDeveloper and BPEL will be the most sought after tools for working with Oracle's products while Java will remain the core technology of choice. PL/SQL will still be supported but will not be maintstream as Java, Servlets, Enterprise Java Beans, Java Server Faces, Struts and the like.


Learning is a constant for the software community and this time around the investment is expected to pay good dividends and remain a cash cow for years to come - more so if Customers buy into Oracle's Project Fusion gamble consultants can strike gold early - a huge customer base lies waiting to move onto the Project Fusion bandwagon.