Eye on Fusion
Continued
"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.
Margaret Lindquist is editor of
Profit: The Business of Technology.
