The painfully long NDAs Oracle has had industry analysts under expired yesterday. Last evening was supposed to be the finally here (after “half way” was celebrated in 2006) coming out for Fusion applications.
Instead, Larry Ellison sounded tentative. Go ahead and deploy Fusion if you are “brave” and "God bless you if you do so”
It should be one of Fusion’s main selling points – that you can deploy in private or public cloud flavors. Instead there was a rambling part professor, part sniper at competitor, part cloud in a Exalogic box talk. The message got diluted in the “You can define the cloud however you want” tone. No wonder Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com tweeted at the end “Beware of the false cloud”
Fusion is a transactional system. It should be focused on next-gen collaboration, supply chain optimization, crowdsourcing, social networking and predictive analytics functionality we increasingly need. Instead the 5 minute demo focused on more traditional slice and dice with a painfully long time on a slide featuring bar charts. And the biggest selling point Larry brought out was “it is built on industry standard middleware”. What exactly does that have to do with newer models of recruiting in virtual worlds or agile implementations?
“Oh, only a sneak preview. More coming Wednesday.” Sure - we are half way there, already. Again.
