Monday, July 28, 2008

On The Horns Of A Dilemma

When the concept of Fusion Applications was initially announced, I was pretty excited about the applicability of those apps in my shop. The idea of industry-standard integration across organizations and technology stacks, coupled with a Web 2.0-like user interface, really hit home with some needs I saw looming on the horizon.

Almost three years later, I'm still excited about Fusion Applications. However, I do have a little problem: I'm now face-to-face with those needs that were looming on the horizon a few years ago. The need for integration is especially urgent right now in my shop. Unfortunately, those needs arrived more quickly than Fusion Applications.

The good news here is that I can address the integration issues immediately at hand by extending the E-Business Suite with Fusion Middleware. The bad news is that, if Fusion Middleware addresses the integration issues adequately, the Web 2.0-like UI alone may not be enough of a value-add to justify making the move to Fusion Applications. If I knew more about Fusion Applications, the "bad news" element could be mitigated by emphasizing additional value...but I don't know enough about Fusion Applications to make that argument anytime soon. So, due to a timing problem between the appearance of my integration issues and the release of information about Fusion Applications, I'm worried about losing the nifty UI flexibility that will provide noticeable benefit to my end-users (and create a truck-load of customer satisfaction to boot).

Now, don't take this post as a rant over Oracle's secrecy regarding Fusion Applications. Far from it: I understand the legal and strategic reasons driving the lack of information. I'm just pointing out that the lack of info has become a fairly significant (as in losing sleep over it) problem for at least one customer...me.

Anyone else stuck on the horns of a similar dilemma, or am I all alone on this one?

1 comment:

Gaby said...

Same here Floyd... many of our campuses are looking at integration between systems and I wish I could deploy solution leveraging Fusion with flexible UI. We will try our best using ADF web services and SOA and see what we can acheive.

On fusion and information I have to agree... very little information and all I can say is for sure in our industry we will need to upgrade to 12 as functionality is not expected till 2015+ in fusion! What a bummer... one more upgrade before fusion!!
A+