Charles, it is still a moonshot

Providing an update on Project Fusion, Oracle President Charles Phillips commented yesterday "We're dropping 'project.' It sounds like we're going to the moon. It sounds too exploratory"

In 1961, when Kennedy famously talked about the moonshot he talked about landing there AND safely bringing man back to earth.

Oracle just delivering Fusion is not sufficient, though that would be a great achievement in itself. Successfully and economically migrating the thousands of customers to it is the "safely bringing man back" part. As I have written before few vendors make migration easy. As Oracle has itself pointed out even SAP has not had a stellar record moving its own customer base, even with a maturing product.

Releasing a decent architecture soon and reasonably robust applications by 2008 would be a great achivement in itself. No vendor has successfully delivered 300+ enterprise application modules in a 3 year time frame - the replacement modules for Oracle, PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel and other customer bases Oracle has acquired.

The breadth and complexity of applications, the number of customers to be migrated, the architectural shift...not sure even NASA had such an ambitious task. Charles, using the moonshot analogy may not be bad. Certainly inspired another team to do the magical.