Oracle Shows First “Real” Fusion Apps

Implications: Oracle is getting close to delivering on their promises about Fusion.  If the final suite of products can match the early previews, they have achieved a “game-changer” in enterprise applications.

Analysis: At Enterprise 2.0 this week Oracle has a booth showing previews of some of their upcoming Fusion applications.  What’s visible at the booth represents a truly remarkable turnaround for a traditional enterprise applications vendor.  They are showing products that have a simple, intuitive user interface and incorporate numerous Web 2.0 features.  They could have (and many expected they would!) simply adopt a few collaboration tools and claim they were Web 2.0-enabled.  Instead they appear to have really thought about how to take the best concepts of Web 2.0 and incorporate those into enterprise applications.

The Oracle Sales Library tool, for example, allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations, which are then dissected slide-by-slide and made available to users by slide.  Each slide can be tagged and rated by users, so once a few presentations are loaded there will be a library of annotated individual slides that can be quickly reconstructed into new presentations.  Today when someone needs to do a new Sales presentation they have to painstakingly go through multiple existing presentations and do cut-and-paste to extract the specific slides they need, or just re-create the whole presentation from scratch.  The OSL will present a library of individual slides that can be trivially assembled into a new presentation.  This will be a killer app for Sales and Marketing people, who can now create presentations customized for each customer with minimal effort.  OSL brings “mass-customization” to the Sales/Marketing presentation world.

The caveats are many, of course.  This is still a demo and not a released product.  Oracle will naturally be showing only the best features at the show.  Also, the entire Oracle applications suite consists of dozens of modules, of which this is only one.  There’s no way of knowing how innovative the remaining modules will be.  It’s really hard to do Web 2.0 in General Ledger!  It’s clear the entire suite is not going to be released in the next couple of months, and in fact it could easily be a year or more to get most of the modules released.

Nonetheless, despite the caveats, if this is how Oracle is doing enterprise applications their competitors should be worried – very worried!  The obvious candidate for concern is SAP, but there are numerous smaller companies that should worry.  Many of the SaaS vendors, such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and others, have made their business based on supplying intuitive, elegant interfaces to enterprise users.  If Oracle is able to provide better interfaces and more innovative tools, it bodes ill for their future.  Further, unlike an ERP system, areas such as Sales Force Automation or Human Performance Management delivered as a service can be rather easily replaced, so Oracle could potentially recover some of the business that has migrated to the various SaaS vendors in the last few years.  

The Oracle of 2012 may well achieve Larry Ellison’s goal of $50B in revenue through organic growth as well as acquisitions.