Adriana Lukas – doyenne of the British blogosphere and iconoclast of corporate communication – pointed me at an article about Oracle and its new “Fusion” project, which “fuse together various technologies picked up in its acquisition spree” to “improve our customers’ ability to get the job done“.
That sounds great, but in the past 15 years I have observed plenty of examples of “we bought this, now what the fuck do we do with it?”-itis, and I fear that this may be amongst them:-
news.com.com.com.comService-oriented architecture [ED: BUZZWORD COMPLIANCE] is also key in the creation of Fusion software, John Wookey, Oracle’s senior vice president of application development, told an audience at Oracle OpenWorld here. The Fusion project aims to meld technologies from PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel Systems. Oracle anticipates the first Fusion applications will be released next year, with the suite slated for 2008.
“As the technology changes and evolves, we asked ourselves how we can improve our customers’ ability to get the job done,” Wookey said during his keynote speech.
People are increasingly entering the work force never having lived their lives without the Internet, he noted. That means they expect collaboration tools, instant messaging, search and other Net-related technologies to be an integral part of their tools in the workplace, he added.
Check the last para; yes, they’re right, but they say nothing about what IM products, etc, they want. If they lead with an Oracle-Own-Brand IM with its own client and which does not interoperate with the rest of the world, they’re sunk; or at least the Web 2.0-ness of it all will be sunk.
I’ve seen this happen elsewhere, like MSN which once was “going to be bigger than the Internet” – back in the days when Microsoft wanted to kill AOL – or even simply in (ahem) companies leveraging internal homebrew IM-tools and trying to take them public when a market demand arises, blindly ignoring adherance to extant open solutions and protocols – a tactic which Adriana refers to as “bandwagon jumping”.
The articles continues:
A sales representative, for example, could e-mail a quote to a customer, who would then call it up and view it through the same user interface. The customer could then click on a collaboration tab and engage in an instant-messaging conversation with the sales representative.
Yes, that’s sexy and cool – so let’s home that Oracle don’t try mandating installation of OracleIM v1.0 in order to have that conversation, when instead allowing the business-expensive but customers-effective choice of any of AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, Skype and MSN would be faster, would not burden the customer, would not require rollout of yet more client software, and would not require even yet more approvals from whoever owns the customer’s corporate firewall to punch yet another service through it, subject to FSA / SEC recording requirements, code review, etc…
I will watch with interest, but if companies today already have to reorganise themselves to fit Oracle Financials’ business models (on the premise that it’s cheaper and easier to do that than to configure Oracle to fit existing business structures) – then my bet is we will see Yet Another Instant Messenger Solution from Oracle, with a small hedge-bet that they might adopt Jabber a-la Gmail/Gchat.
Plus a per-seat deployment charge for the IM-client.
If so, that won’t be Web 2.0, it’ll be tragic.
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