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...