Ellison's Dodgy 'Cloud', Oracle Fusion and Gillette Fusion

Why not just add to the confusion?

Earlier this month Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took to the stage for a much anticipated announcement of Oracle's Cloud strategy. This includes the long-awaited 'Fusion Apps' and other 'cloud' services. So, as always I ran this by the NIST criteria to assess whether these are proper Cloud offerings. Well, that's easy. By virtue of the offerings being virtualised single-tenant, they aren't. It's more akin to the old ASP/Outsourcing model, with none of the efficiencies of the more modern multi-tenant architectures such as Salesforce.com, or indeed Facebook etc.


Lots has been written about this keynote so I am not going to retread too much old ground, the links below give decent overall POVs with which I mainly agree:

• Phil Wainewright summarises the Oracle motivation for continuing to milk their traditional model very well in this interview. He also pulls apart the 'security' argument against multi-tenancy that Ellison uses in this blog post.
• Frank Scavo point out that Oracle have exaggerated the availability of Oracle Cloud and pulled Ellison up on the claim that they have spent the last 7 years working on 'Cloud' apps. Project Fusion started then, but there was no mention of a Cloud model until recently.
• Ron Miller points out that their model is 'expensive rather than cheap' and 'complex rather than simple' and thinks this is 'doomed to failure'.
• The list of the 100 Cloud Apps by Constellation Research. As they quite rightly point out, Oracle are pushing it a bit by claiming that the 500,000 and 100,000 record version of Fusion Marketing Segmentation are two different apps.

Oracle have let me down

I am disappointed in Oracle. Although I have in recent years moved away from their technology to Salesforce and equivalent Cloud solutions, I thought they would catch up. Ellison is swimming against the tide, hanging on to the old world. He is 68 now, maybe with little incentive to revolutionise their approach for the long-term.

The Oracle Fusion Promise (2006)

I remember in 2006 Oracle had made many big acquisitions and started a project to bring the best of each of these together, announcing that:

"The Fusion project aims to meld technologies from PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel Systems"

A guy called John Wookey, Oracle's senior vice president of application development made this announcement. At the time I was excited about the potential of this. Interestingly Wookey left Oracle in 2008, the year the first Fusion apps were due to appear. Oh, and he now works for Salesforce as of 2011.

So now we are in 2012 and we find Fusion Apps being the main chunk of the 'Oracle Cloud' offering along with a Java hosted PaaS and a hosted database service. No mention of PeopleSoft etc, that idea must have been binned.

Elision mentions in his keynote that 100 Fusion apps are available NOW. Well, I tried to register for a demo and just got the following (same as Frank Scavo above):

It has been 6 years! And still nothing. Disappointing. I just want a trial of Oracle Fusion CRM, not too much to ask.


Want Fusion? Go to Gillette.

Co-incidentally Gillette also announced their 'Fusion' range in 2006. If we compare Oracle Fusion to Gillette Fusion which was also announced in 2006 we see that Gillette have been much more productive. They have released 6 razors in that time and numerous complimentary products! From the Gillette Fusion Power to the Fusion ProGlide, now that's more like it. Oracle even pay tribute to this with the colour of their 'Register Me' button above.

Oracle CRM OnDemand - Where are you?One of the blog posts quite rightly asked why Oracle CRM OnDemand is not in the list of 100 Cloud apps. I implemented this a few times and it was like a more basic version of Salesforce Sales Cloud without the extensibility/platform elements. For a long time this was mooted as a competitor to Salesforce, and it in fact sits on a proper multi-tenant architecture. However it looks to me like Fusion CRM has superseded that so I would not expect it to be supported/enhanced for too much longer. I tried to get clarity from Oracle on this, my queries were ignored:

@OracleCloudZone @Oracle Why is Oracle CRM OnDemand not included here? It is a multi-tenant cloud app. Decommisioning?


@OracleCloudZone @Oracle I will try again. Why is Oracle CRM OnDemand not in this list? Is it classed as legacy now?


@OracleCloudZone Can you please reply to my question as to why Oracle CRM OnDemand is not in the cloud apps list?


@Oracle @OracleCloudZone hello? This is all a bit one way. Please answer my question. Or are these twitter accounts just 'one-way'?


@Oracle @OracleCRM @OracleComms @OracleCloudZone Why is Oracle CRM OnDemand not in this list? Surely you will respond?


@OracleComms Does the 'Comms' bit stand for 'communication'? If so, is that just one-way? You are not responding to me? @Oracle@OracleCRM


@OracleComms I am asking why oracle crm ondemand is not listed in the list of 100 cloud apps announced by larry Ellison recently.


@Oracle Hi, this is my daily repeat of the question 'Why is Oracle CRM OnDemand not in your list of the 100 Cloud apps?' Still no answer


Still waiting for an answer.



So I can't see this ending well...

Based on the general understanding that proper 'Cloud' multi-tenant services are more cost effective and allow more focussed/rapid business innovation, I expect Oracle to fail slowly in the Cloud race until they buy a proper Cloud platform. But I guess we will know more when Oracle make the Fusion apps and Cloud services generally available. 


Until then you can always get a bit of Fusion Hydra-Smooth Aftershave Balm to keep you going.