The efforts at making its acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel all play nice with Oracle applications has reached a halfway mark.
If Oracle can pull off Project Fusion without being a major disruption or angering customers, the company may accomplish the most significant project it’s had since Larry Ellison founded the company. Oracle has made some very pricey bets that middleware applications beyond its signature back-end database will be the way to maintain a competitive edge against the likes of Microsoft and IBM.
In an event at San Francisco’s City Hall, Oracle’s co-president Charles Phillips told a group of business people and reporters that they had reached the midpoint on the path to combining their acquisitions under Fusion, CRN reported from the meeting. “Oracle is halfway to Fusion, and that’s the toughest half,” Phillips said to the group. “(W)e remain on track for the 2008 target delivery of the Oracle Fusion Applications.”
Oracle made one well-received gesture to its business customers in 2005, in extending support for applications from its newly purchased companies to nearly a lifetime basis. A previous CRN report noted how JD Edwards and PeopleSoft applications all faced an assortment of end-of-life dates and customer concern before Oracle made that announcement at OpenWorld in December.
In a statement, Oracle said it would have enhanced versions of its applications available in 2006: Oracle E-Business Suite 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12. In 2007, a new version of JD Edwards World is planned. Eventually, all of those products will be upgraded to Oracle Fusion Applications.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
