I have watched with interest the Oracle/Forrester back and forth around Fusion apps
Two observations
Comparing Fusion to other pure play SaaS products is myopic. Oracle offers its customers the full SIP (Software, Infrastructure, Platform) as a service. Fusion will always offer customers hybrid on-premise, hosted, public cloud options. This will look muddy and convoluted, but real world IT has never been pretty. Oracle’s cloud vision and offerings are far away the most expansive in the industry today. Microsoft with Azure comes close, but no outsourcer, hardware, software company today allows customers that big a cloud SIP footprint.
Oracle does itself a bit of a disservice by primarily talking about Fusion in terms of co-existence for incumbent customers. Last week at Infor, which has a similar large on-premise customer base, I heard a much more positive cloud sandbox and upgrade message. It’s time for Oracle to similarly start nudging its on-premise customer base that for certain system lifecycle phases, applications the cloud is inherently superior.
