Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Oracle: No Fusion (yet)

January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Oracle: No Fusion (yet)

TAGS: Applications

Josh Greenbaum is reporting that Oracle has not started writing code for its Fusion product yet. What is Fusion? Well, Oracle bills it as "The Only Comprehensive, Hot-Pluggable, Unbreakable Middleware." And it would be, if only it existed.

This is the same product that Oracle was talking up two years ago as a way to tie together its disparate acquisitions. Two years later, it seems that not a single line of code has been written. Greenbaum learned from Oracle that this isn't cause to worry, because writing the code is the last thing that needs to be done (after mapping out the business processes, etc.). What a relief! I mean, it's comforting to know that the code will just magically appear overnight after two years of talking about it.

This is one of the biggest problems with big, proprietary enterprise software. Oracle has been sitting on its marketing bravado for two years with nothing to show for it. In an open source world, where everyone can see exactly what you have and evaluate it, this could not happen. If I were an Oracle applications customer, I'd be furious.

However, as Greenbaum notes, maybe Oracle's inability to ship a product isn't all that injurious to them:

It's clear from looking at Oracle's numbers that maintenance revenues are becoming a bigger and more important slice of the pie, and, if I were inside Oracle betting on cashing in my options, I'd be placing every resource I could on making sure those Big Four applications were up to date and their customers loving it.

It's also clear to me that no matter how solidly behind Fusion Oracle is today, or how groovy the prototypes look in six months, a solid Fusion-based revenue stream isn't very likely for a number of years. Mostly because it's going to be hard to justify going with Fusion 1.0: Even if Oracle does a bang-up job first time around, the 1.0 curse will keep a lot of customers on the fence waiting for the 1.0 pioneers to debug the software well-enough to make 2.0 the real GA release....

But the 2009 timeframe does mean that customers sitting on the fence about where they are going to be in three years with Oracle are paying a lot for their uncertainty: at 22% of their license fee, the maintenance costs for most customers will have paid by 2009 will be darn close to their original license cost, if they haven't already topped the 100% mark by then....[A]ny Applications Unlimited customer looking to truly cut costs and streamline the IT budget has to ask him or herself what price that uncertainty might be costing.

Here's a word of advice, Oracle: learn from open source. Release early and often. Let your customers see and use the product before they fork over mountains of cash to you for it. Your proprietary model may have worked in the past, but you're quickly nearing the point where it won't work anymore.

And, frankly, wouldn't that be a relief? For customers, yes, but also for you?

Posted by Matt Asay on January 31, 2007 12:38 PM

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