One of my favorite enterprise software executives is Steve Miranda, who heads applications development at Oracle. His title is a bit narrow. He is also a key customer interface and the unofficial CIO at Oracle. This gives him a unique POV on trends in application software, hosting and implemntation issues.
He is also someone you can have an open conversation with as Ray Wang does here. I particularly liked his candor in explaining why Fusion apps have taken so long to mature and what he would re-do if he could
"Today, we laugh about it, but in all seriousness, we started the clock too early. When we acquired PeopleSoft, we had a release of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Then, we bought BEA, Siebel, and Hyperion. Each acquisition changed the targets."
"If I had to do it over again, we would have gone to market sooner with less depth. Our original design point was to create a path for our existing customers facing a changing world. Scoping down a product did not make sense. Parity would instantly become an issue. Yet, somehow, the world changed in the past 5 years. Customers are now more willing to give up other features and benefits for the cloud."
It is a nice read, and he goes into where Fusion has found early and later adopters - 400 of them.
BTW reading his comments also reminded me of the Miller Lite commercials with fights over taste versus calories. It's now feature/function versus cloud delivery in application software. Or more realistically, a balance of both. The world has surely changed.
