Oracle's long march toward Fusion Applications, a massive effort to bring together the best functionality of its many acquisitions, took a significant step forward at Open World when CEO Larry Ellison demonstrated the forthcoming Oracle Fusion Applications. Ellison Said "We basically decided to take all the best features of PeopleSoft, Oracle and Siebel and re implement those features on top of a fusion middleware infrastructure entirely written from Java.
It’s a significant step for an effort "more than five years in the making," according to Ellison, but for customers, it is only the beginning. While Oracle has continued to support, and even update, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel under its Applications Unlimited program, the new applications require some careful thinking.
CRM represents the early Fusion Applications
In fact, CRM has led the way for Fusion Applications. It was three years ago that Ellison first announced that Fusion Applications had arrived, demonstrating a couple of Social CRM tools for sales collaboration. In addition, it was clear from sessions at Open World that the Fusion CRM capabilities received a lot of attention. It will probably get a lot of customer attention as well, thanks partly to the core customer data model. One of the core things in Fusion CRM is that as people are starting to use different pieces, it all comes back to the data model. The customer record gets tied back to Fusion CRM. People will gravitate to that because a lot of the core Fusion CRM product has been built on the Siebel customer model.
While the "first" Fusion Applications were Oracle's Social CRM tools, the company has poured most of its CRM development efforts into CRM on Demand, its Software as a Service (SaaS) applications based on what was originally Siebel On Demand. Most new sales of CRM at Oracle have been the CRM On Demand product. The key thing for customers is if you're coming in from Siebel try to get to the latest version of Siebel first. The upgrade path is encompassing more and more Fusion components. Basically, a lot of the Fusion middleware components that are required are showing up in later releases. As long as you're in an upgradeable release, you're on the right path.
Oracle CRM customers thinking ahead
The upgrades are painful but they're worth it. They definitely justify themselves. If we start doing point upgrades on certain areas, will that get us out of sync in our total integration? Is there a chance one area gets behind, one gets ahead, and I can't take advantage of something?.The new Fusion CRM applications have the comprehensive hub around customers and contacts, planning capacity and integrations. Oracle did not release pricing information on any of the Fusion Applications. It is making the applications available to beta testers at the end of this year, and the applications will be generally available in the first quarter of 2011.Customers up to date on their maintenance and support will be able to do a like-to-like swap. They’ve taken the time to figure out what the largest Siebel customer wants and what their footprint is. Customers would have to pay for modules they do not already have installed. In two to three years, the first of the functionality will be built out, and in the next three to four years, Fusion CRM will have complete parity with the base horizontal functionality.
PeopleSoft CRM upgrade to Fusion CRM would be a great challenge but unfortunately there is limited option for them way ahead.
One thing that look very promising is the way Fusion CRM march forward when compared to other Fusion apps where still people are not completely aware of the benefits over Oracle R12.X application but at the same time its way behind to catch up on the industry specific modules like the ones Siebel Industry vertical applications offer. We look forward Larry to invest on this and make a quick buck out of Fusion CRM Industry application.
Good Luck Oracle Amigos
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