With over 200 early adopters such as GE Healthcare, Siemens, Boeing and Franklin Templeton Investments and the controlled release period officially over, Oracle Fusion applications are now ‘generally available' to all customers across the world. So what are these Fusion applications? In simple terms, they are a re-write of Oracle's existing applications such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, Oracle E-Business Suite, etc. on top of modern technology. The Fusion suite includes applications for Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship Manangement (CRM), Supply Chain Management and Financial Management. Fusion applications run both on-premise and in the cloud with security built into the middleware, database and the operating system. They also have a service-oriented architecture for simple integration. To understand the way forward for Fusion apps, Business Line spoke with Doug Hughes , Vice-President (Japan and Asia-Pacific), Applications Development, Oracle. The conversation took place on the sidelines of Oracle OpenWorld 2011, San Francisco, for which this writer was a sponsored media invitee.

What sets Fusion applications apart from existing products?

There is something new in Fusion applications that do not exist in other products in the Oracle stack right now. For example, things like ‘Network at Work' – an internal collaboration tool. We never had that in the past. We never thought we needed it. Now, it's probably a fundamental thing that most people are working at – ability to collaborate within the firewall and collaborate on projects. Another good thing we did with Fusion is that we poured business intelligence into the application, not alongside the application. What it means is that we can actually run the ‘what if' analysis. We can do predictive work. Every time you are moving through, there is some form of analytics. A big deal with Fusion apps is the richness of the information presented to you to make a decision.

So is this the value addition that Fusion applications offer to customers?

I see Fusion applications providing a strategic way forward to our customers. For them, the choice of Oracle as their enterprise software vendor now stands justified because, by unveiling Fusion apps, we have shown them the next generation applications. If I, as a customer, were using some other piece of software from some other place in world, I would be asking my vendor, “Where is your next generation application? When are you going to come out with it?” It took us quite a long time to put these out. So, if someone is not announcing releases very soon, they are quite a distance away from having a product. I would really hate to be in the shoes of another software vendor that does not have an answer to these questions that customers might ask.

How has the experience with the early adopters been?

Very good. You have to be careful with who you take on in the early adoption stage. The first thing is a need from the customer's side. Is there a gap? Does he have a need for a new product? The next question to ask is, does the customer have an appetite for early adoption? Early adoption has its own set of requirements. It's a way of engaging directly in the development cycle. The early adopters work with us to look at the product. So, there is a certain size of business I find is very suitable for this. One of our early adopters is IFJ. In the incentive compensation they had earlier, the Siebel incentive compensation, they were caught writing code. Here, every time they did a plan, they saw Fusion sync up to get that done within the system. So for them, there was massive productivity enhancement and much greater flexibility.

How is the market dynamics in India for Fusion apps?

From a market perspective, CRM is strong in India. CRM on Demand - the SaaS model is something for which I believe India is well positioned. On HR, with the explosion of salaries occurring in India, there is now an emerging need for performance and goal management, retention, etc. However, you have to be careful because you need to trade the cost of the software versus the cost of the person. That's why I don't see it happening in China yet. When you have low labour costs, why would you spend money on software to retain someone? India is now at a tipping point. I think the maturity of the market place in India might pick up.

As far as supply chain is concerned, there are interesting supply chain products in Fusion . Companies that have multiple systems logistics, SAP, Oracle, etc. can try to pull them together to do their decision making process. That, I think, might apply to India because of its nature as a manufacturing hub. I don't see financials for India yet, not probably for another year or two. And that means the area of procurements and projects as well, because they are all tied together.

How important is Fusion applications as a revenue centre for the company?

Fusion is total change. It is going to change the way companies do business in IT. But it is really evolving. As a revenue centre, I am not considering that right now. My focus is to get the product out; to have my customers 100 per cent stable; to have my partners certified and knowledgeable about what's going on; to get the market place to understand me and my competitors to fear me. My primary focus is customers' stability on the platforms they are on and taking Fusion as and when they need it to expand their business.

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