What the Future May Look Like

A very interesting commentary on last week's Oracle World conference:

Oracle Buying Spree Makes for Strange Bedfellows

This is the key passage:

Gartner's view is that Project Fusion will not support DB2 if Oracle proceeds as originally planned with its eBusiness Suite as the technological foundation for the application suite, Holincheck said.

This is because much of the application logic for the eBusiness Suite in embedded in the Oracle database, he said. This means it won't be an easy task to rewrite the applications so they do not rely on the embedded application logic and thereby work more easily with either Oracle or DB2.

It's possible that the acquisition of Siebel will change the situation, Holincheck said. Oracle has changed its position somewhat by "by saying that Siebel is really going to be the starting point for where they're going in CRM applications," he said.

It's possible that if eBusiness Suite—with reliance on application logic embedded in the Oracle database—isn't the foundation for Project Fusion, then it might be easier to give customers the choice of running the applications on either Oracle or DB2, said Holincheck.

It's probably unlikely that this will happen, but there is still a chance, he said.

Could the Siebel acquisition actually change Oracle's plans for Fusion? Stay tuned...

This Is Interesting

Oracle Lowers Upgrade Hurdle For Some PeopleSoft And J.D. Edwards App Users

At my current client, we were told recently that we would need to perform an upgrade to the 8.9 product to get to Fusion...which we are currently undertaking (although it's not the only reason). I wonder if the decision process would have been different with this little piece of information...

Oooh, This is Bad

For those of us who rely on a particular site for competitive advantage, this is bad news...

Worm Poses as Google

Man, if you can't trust Google, who can you trust?

SAP Runnin' Smack

I guess it's predictable...

SAP executive knocks Oracle-Siebel deal, says Oracle will fail

...and this comes from SAP North America, which makes it even more interesting...

Simpler is Better

Cognos builds on their ReportNet infrastructure...

Cognos: Big Step in BI

Taking five application servers and merging them into one is always good...it will be interesting to see if they can shake the inertia of their somewhat inflexible past.

Here We Go Again

The Oracle apologists are still employed over at Business Week:

Now, Oracle May Finally Rest

Another fine example of someone trying to analyze a software merger from an application perspective, but having no expertise to do it and allowing their real bias to show. The author conveniently misses things such as...

• The actual application that Siebel sells
• The assumption that the entire world runs on Oracle database software (hint: it doesn't)
• The utter confusion of Oracle's product offerings until "Fusion" is released, whose release date, assuming Siebel CRM will be folded in, will be extended even further

But, hey, the shareholders are happy, so that's all that matters, right?

MOTO* Du Jour

Oracle to Acquire Siebel

This move was pretty obvious to those following the CRM space for the past year or so. Tom Siebel likes it, which just proves that he's really retired. The more appropriate take, I think, is from SalesForce.com's Marc Benioff:

“Now, the same thing that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die.”

Yet another purchase of a customer list and maintenance revenue by Larry Ellison...

* "Master of the Obvious" - a shout out to the late great Pete Axthelm