As Published In August 2006

Eye on Fusion
By Margaret Lindquist

Oracle's Jesper Andersen on applications strategies and Oracle Fusion

If there's one question that Jesper Andersen, Oracle's senior vice president for applications strategy, gets most often from customers, it's this. "They're asking me, 'Can you help me think about Fusion? Is it a big thing? Should I upgrade to it in 2008? Do I have to upgrade my entire suite of applications even if I'm running, say, [Oracle's] PeopleSoft HR and Oracle Financials today?'" Part of the reason for the questions, according to Andersen, is that Oracle's competitors are doing their best to get out there and talk more about Oracle's situation than they are about their own products. "They're telling customers that they should be very worried about what Oracle is doing. But the reality is, our customers should not be worried," Andersen emphasizes. "We've given our customers a very long lifeline of the current products. We intend to continue to develop them for a very, very long time."

Customer input and Oracle's continued development of its products are happening in parallel at Oracle these days, as development teams are focused on bringing together the best features of the products Oracle has acquired over the past two years as well as making sure that customers facing new challenges are getting the opportunity to provide input into the development project. "There's a lot of activity working with customers, because obviously you can't build products in an ivory tower. You have to talk a lot to your customers," says Andersen. "Over the last year or so, we've spent time at conferences and with customers. Our customers today are very comfortable with Fusion and understand that we're not forcing them to do anything. This is really giving customers an opportunity to leverage some of the innovation that's happened in this space."

Andersen, in some ways, exemplifies the spirit of Oracle right now. Danish by birth, Andersen worked at Oracle earlier in his career before joining a startup and then making a move to PeopleSoft—the same month that Oracle declared its intent to acquire the company.

No Pressure

"A lot of the credit for the smooth integrations we've experienced in development goes to John Wookey [Oracle's executive vice president for applications development] for integrating our teams. He doesn't have a 'not invented here' mentality, and so we've really taken what was best in all of the companies that we brought together. Overall, it's been a smooth ride," says Andersen.

But while Andersen's team is focused on the future, the present has not been forgotten. In April, at the Collaborate '06 user group conference, Oracle President Charles Phillips announced "Applications Unlimited," Oracle's program to ensure that customers get the best of both worlds—more value from their current applications, which will be enhanced indefinitely, and the option to upgrade to future technologies when the time is right.

"We're very much engaged in the scoping exercise around Fusion, but we're equally focused on scoping out the new releases that are planned for existing product lines," says Andersen. "When I meet with a customer, I consider it my No. 1 responsibility to learn as much as I can about that customer's specific situation—the software they have today and what kind of demands their business will be making in the near term and further in the future. Our challenge is to provide guidance, given those differences and the nuances that every enterprise has," he adds.

Bringing Things Together

One of Andersen's most interesting challenges over the past six months has been helping to drive the combination of the Oracle and Siebel development teams. "There was an awful lot of getting to know each other and learning how different processes worked at Siebel and how they work at Oracle," states Andersen. "But there is one organization right now. There are many people in the organization who have responsibility across those different product lines—we're thinking as one team and have been for quite a while."

And naturally, there are a number of people focused on Oracle Fusion right now. "We're in the later stages of completing the scoping of Oracle Fusion. We have worked at a very detailed level with our advisory boards on what's most important and done detailed assessments of the comparisons between PeopleSoft, Oracle, and JD Edwards across horizontal solutions and industry solutions and cross-solution initiatives like business intelligence and so on. And that's culminating in the scope for Fusion," says Andersen.

One area where customers are definitely responding is reflected in increased adoption of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which powers Fusion applications and current applications, around areas like security or integration, technology, Web services, and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). "Getting all that technology in place with your existing PeopleSoft, Oracle, Siebel, or JD Edwards applications is a great first step toward a future vision of loosely coupled applications," affirms Andersen. "The most important thing to keep in mind is that we have all the things you need to take advantage of these new technologies today, whether that's the technology at an Oracle Fusion Middleware level or the use of our existing applications across all the families. We can do that today."

A Good Step

But what's the most critical first step that a company can take when considering the path ahead? "The organization has to be crystal clear on what its main drivers are. The CIO should be thinking about an architecture and an infrastructure that makes it possible for the company to address those top-level needs while generating more nimbleness and more agility in the corporation," says Andersen. This, he adds, is where service-oriented architecture (SOA) comes in. SOA is a way of building software applications that promotes connectivity between components so developers can reuse them. SOA implements business functionality as a set of shared, reusable services that are platform-, language-, and operating system-independent. "SOA is going to allow you to take some of your less-strategic business functions and leave them there for an extended period of time—this will free you up to address the projects with the highest strategic importance," says Andersen.