Q&A: Oracle apps development head outlines Fusion

Computerworld - As senior vice president of applications development at ERP and database software maker Oracle Corp., John Wookey faces the considerable task of crafting the vendor’s next-generation suite of business software, dubbed Fusion. In the wake of Oracle’s latest healthy earnings report (see ”Oracle’s profits up on license sales”), Wookey spent time this week talking about progress on Fusion and on some expected milestones.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

You had a strong quarter. Can you connect the financial results with the Fusion work you’re doing? Over the last few months, we’ve seen working with the CIO advisory board, and the customer committees that customers have been getting comfortable and conversant with what the [Fusion] plan is, and they’re translating what it means into their own current deployments in PeopleSoft or the E-Business Suite. We have very happy customers coming back and buying additional products. We’re doing very, very well going head to head with SAP.

Can you give an update on the work with Siebel? There are two pieces. One is the analytics. Siebel had really good technology, and we’re embracing that in Oracle (see ”Oracle unveils BI suite”). [Another piece] on the CRM side is that we have integrated the organizations. We’re planning Siebel 8.0, with some enhancements and a service-oriented architecture. One of the things in the [Siebel] product set is that each [functional] area actually will have its own task-based user interface flow. Siebel 8.0 is under way and targeted for late this year.

In addition, we plan to work aggressively to integrate Siebel CRM capabilities into Oracle and PeopleSoft ERP systems. We’re looking at packaged integration, and we have a project under way, and this year, we’ll deliver integration. Horizontally, it will be around quoting and order management flows and integrating Siebel OnDemand into the PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP back-end systems. Vertically, Siebel has financial industry service sales force automation, and we’ll integrate it into our core banking applications. Also, their life sciences product had good [sales force automation], and they had a clinical trial management system similar to our own academic research applications and that will be integrated. It’s all laid out, but we haven’t announced specific timing.

What about other applications? Later this year, there will be a major release of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Version 12, and PeopleSoft Enterprise, Version 9. J.D. Edwards Version 8.12 will come out in the next few months. There will also be another release of J.D. Edwards, EnterpriseOne 9.0, approximately 18 months after that, focused on very specific customer-requested enhancements. We’ll also come out with J.D. Edwards World, No. A9.1, early next year.