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SAN FRANCISCO – Oracle’s famous CEO didn’t need musician Billy Joel to
introduce him at Oracle OpenWorld to get the audience’s attention, but if
you can afford it, why not? “Do you want me to sing while you play piano?”
Larry Ellison asked as Joel walked off stage and the crowd laughed.
But Joel didn’t play and Ellison got quickly down to business before a
packed conference hall of thousands of Oracle customers Wednesday afternoon.
(Joel, Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Nicks with Mick Fleetwood were slated to
perform at a party for attendees in the evening).
Ellison jumped quickly into Oracle’s news of the week, recapping its virtualization news, Linux support and applications based on its Fusion technology.
On the Linux front, Ellison said Oracle’s made significant headway since
announcing its adoption of Red Hat Linux, with over a thousand customers on board, including such recognizable names as Diebold, iHop, Timex,
Abercrombie & Fitch and the City of Las Vegas.
Ellison claimed Oracle has
spent most of its efforts the past year on technical and engineering support
and fixing bugs in Red Hat to make sure it worked reliably with Oracle
software. “We’re only just really starting our sales effort,” he said. “We
think we’ll grow faster next year.”
Part of that effort is an
announcement that tech reseller CDW will market Oracle’s Linux products.
Ellison also acknowledged Red Hat’s growth in “a healthy market” for both
companies. “We’re also doing something Red Hat isn’t, which is shipping
Oracle VM underneath our Linux offering so there is a single stack of code.
If you have applications that run on Red Hat, it will run unchanged on
Oracle’s enterprise software.”
Fusion in 2008
The bulk of his talk focused on Oracle’s next generation of applications,
called Fusion.
Ellison said the first Fusion apps, built on Oracle’s “industry standard
middleware” and a Service Oriented Architecture (define), are on track for
release by the middle of 2008 at the latest. “I fantasize about them shipping earlier,” said Ellison.
In talking to customers about their wish list for Fusion, Ellison said the number one concern they raised is that it co-exist with existing applications. Ellison promised Fusion will integrate with popular Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and CRM systems via “integration packs” that will come with the software. “It integrates with ERP because it has to, that’s
where your customer data is,” said Ellison.
Two other customer concerns Ellison raised is that Fusion be better than
just “cool new technology” and deliver measurable business benefit and that
it be available on premises as well as a Software as a Service (SaaS). The CEO said
in fact Fusion will be available as both on premise and SaaS (define).
On the value point Ellison stressed that Fusion does more than simply
automate tasks, it uses business intelligence to help users make better
decisions. Ellison and Oracle vice president of CRM On Demand, Anthony Lye,
went through several demos of Fusion applications that are far along in
development.
For example, while a process automation application will help with
ordering a product from a supplier and getting approvals, Ellison said a
Fusion app will tell you if making the order will put you over budget. “You
might still want to place the order but you have more information to make
your decision,” said Ellison.
Fusion is designed to augment applications like such as Sales Force
Automation (SFA) from the likes of Oracle’s own Siebel line and Salesforce.com.
Ellison called these useful forecasting tools for sales manager. But a
Fusion application called Sales Prospector functions as a kind of data
mining application, looking at the data in those SFA apps to help
salespeople find new selling opportunities.
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