As Published In November 2006

Unlimited Horizons
By John Matelski

Applications Unlimited eases concerns about customer implementations.

There's no doubt that Oracle's Fusion strategy is bold and exciting. There's also no doubt that, as a CIO, I was a little worried when I first heard about it. Oracle's Fusion Applications strategy is about the future— if Oracle can merge the best functionality from each set of products using an open and standards-based platform, we'll get great functionality down the road. But I also have to think about whether we'll continue to get a good return on our existing IT investments. There was fear among many customers that if Oracle focused all of its efforts on Fusion, current implementations could have become lame ducks. Applications Unlimited has eased that worry.

For example, the City of Orlando uses Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Version 8.10 for our financial systems. The announcement of Oracle Fusion Applications made me wonder whether we were going to get the support and enhancements we need to meet our expectations for our current implementation. We were evaluating an upgrade to 8.11 or 8.12, but the clock was ticking—if I wasn't going to get enhanced features or functionality or the legal and regulatory updates that affect our business, we would have to make a decision whether to move to a different product or stay in the same product line and evaluate the value proposition for having a third-party vendor provide support and maintenance. But the city's preference is to keep the application and service with one provider, to reduce costs and eliminate the finger-pointing that comes along with having separate applications and support vendors. I prefer to have "one throat to choke" when problems arise.

That's why Oracle's Applications Unlimited announcement came as a reassuring sign that our current applications will not be left to twist in the wind. (In fact, if you listened closely you could hear a gentle breeze as CIOs and CFOs everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief.)

Oracle plans to continue to dedicate development teams to enhance existing applications and work closely with customer advisory boards and user groups. As part of these enhancements, Oracle plans to deliver next-generation application capabilities such as XML reporting, data hubs, BPEL, business activity monitoring, and industry-specific analytics to the current Oracle Applications lines.

While these will not be enormous upgrades with huge new functionality, it is reassuring to know that if we find a problem or gap that needs to be addressed, Oracle will continue to handle those issues. Waiting two years for Oracle Fusion would simply not be an option for most organizations—technologies and processes change constantly, and maintaining a stagnant application is really not in the best interests of any organization.

Applications Unlimited also gives us control of our application destiny. I don't feel as though I'm forced to migrate—either to Oracle Fusion, when it arrives, or to another application. In fact, we are currently evaluating HR modules, and Applications Unlimited buys me time to evaluate where Oracle Fusion Applications is going. We like Oracle's PeopleSoft HR application, but we're already using JD Edwards and we would prefer not to run two separate applications. But today's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne HR module doesn't meet our needs, and we don't want to stick with our current application for too much longer. Prior to Oracle's Applications Unlimited announcement, we thought we were going to make a decision on our HRMS solution over the next six months, but now we feel comfortable waiting until the enterprise resource planning industry settles a bit. If Oracle Fusion Applications brings the best of the five product lines [Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, JD Edwards World, and Siebel] together into an integrated HR and financial solution, then that solution is much more attractive to me than most of the alternatives.

From my point of view, Oracle has done everything it can to eliminate the negative side of combining all these product lines. Yes, they would have lost a large percentage of JD Edwards, Siebel, and PeopleSoft users if they had decided to discontinue support and development of those lines. On the other hand, Oracle is putting hundreds of millions of dollars in development and staff costs into enhancing products that are critical to their customers' current operations. And to my mind, that's a very smart investment.