Manufacturing Executive - March/April 2009 - (Page 25) I ORACLE’S SELF-IMPOSED DEADLINE FOR MAKING ITS NEXT-GENERATION APPLICATIONS SUITE GENERALLY AVAILABLE HAS COME AND GONE, LEAVING CUSTOMERS TO WONDER WHETHER, WHEN, AND HOW TO PLAN THEIR TRANSITIONS. By Jeff Moad n January 2005, soon after his company’s contentious takeover of rival PeopleSoft, Oracle CEO and Chairman Larry Ellison made a dramatic announcement: Oracle, he said, had launched Project Fusion, a major software development effort intended to produce a nextgeneration suite of enterprise applications reflecting the best features and functions of the company’s expanding stable of applications. Project Fusion, Ellison vowed, would produce an integrated suite based on a services-oriented architecture, allowing Oracle to leapfrog competitors such as SAP. And, Ellison said, the suite would be available by the end of 2008. In the months that followed, Oracle officials couldn’t talk enough about Project Fusion. In January 2006, almost a year to the day after unveiling the initiative, Oracle President Charles Phillips, Senior Vice President of Applications Development John Wookey, and other top Oracle officials assembled customers, analysts, and press to declare that the company had reached the halfway mark toward launching the suite, which, they had renamed Fusion Applications. “We’ve made incredible progress, and we’re ahead of schedule,” Phillips said at the time. Soon thereafter, however, something changed. Ellison, Phillips, and other Manufacturing MAR/APR-09 Executive 25
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