ERP Associates, Inc.

Steve Miranda, SVP of Fusion Application Development along with Chris Leone, Group Vice President, ERP Application Product Strategy walked through the Fusion Application features that will be in place for version 1, and gave a live demo of functionality within Financials, HCM and CRM.

As much as I liked the PeopleTools 8.5 and the PeopleSoft 9.1 preview I saw, they can’t quite match the elegance and efficiency of the Fusion UI.  Relevant business intelligence is pervasive at every level.  Dashboards are used not only to present an intuitive view of your data, they also serve a functional role to drive navigation throughout the application.  Collaboration functionality is so integrated and intuitive that you quickly take it for granted.  Graphics slide across the screen as intuitively as a power-point slide.  The work Oracle did in their usability studies has paid off substantially.

But the UI is just the surface.  Fusion is packed with new features to drive productivity.  The navigation model is still there, but it’s de-emphasized as the dashboards present users a role-based view of what needs attention, and navigation from the dashboards is easy and intuitive.  A single, role-based universal worklist is accessible from the app, and it is accessible from outside of the application via RSS.  Configurable “activity guides” walk you through the steps to complete semi-structured processes like on-boarding or period closes.

The expected web 2.0 features are there, including desktop widgets, tagging, and instant collaboration.  Help is contextual (naturally) but in a web 2.0 way:  Add tags, supplement delivered help with your own, blend in text, audio and video and if you let users rate the help, the most highly rated help appears first.

I believe Fusion took a lesson from PeopleSoft in this regard and built on it: Configuration is managed from a single place in the application, and an activity guide walks you through the process to set up new features or functionality.  But once the configuration is in place it doesn’t stop there – you can migrate the configuration data to the different instances for testing and release to production in a structured manner.

The application features they presented were impressive.  Self-monitoring ledger accounts let you know when something’s wrong – you don’t have to search for them.  Collaboration features are leveraged to manage your period close process.  Making the worker the center of HCM will help “deliver the right information at the right time to allow a person to make the right decision.”  And the Fusion Apps team has leveraged business intelligence and collaboration to make the CRM system one that Sales Representatives might actually WANT to use.  Amazing stuff indeed.

After watching a demo like this where everything is so integrated and intuitive and slick, it’s easy to forget that this is built across both Fusion middleware applications and Fusion Applications/Modules.  Assuming that Oracle is in business to make money, you have to ask yourself  “How’s all of this going to be licensed?”  Well, instead of asking myself (which wouldn’t be good for anybody) I posed the question to Steve Miranda.

Miranda said that Oracle hasn’t made any final decisions about this, but he said that they would like to make Fusion licensing “not too fine-grained”, meaning it’ll be based on simple metrics like # of users.  Presumably that means we don’t have to license each Fusion Middleware product separately, and modules will be bundled together in some logical manner.  So far so good.  But there are a lot of decisions still to be made about how your PeopleSoft/EBS/JDE licenses translate to the Fusion World.  For instance, core to Fusion Applications is the ability to customize your business processes with the BPEL process manager.  But as a PeopleSoft user you haven’t licensed it, and at what point does your use of BPEL process manager in Fusion require another license?  In addition, in PeopleSoft, you probably purchased a fine-grained license for a subset of modules based on your company’s revenue.  For EBS, you probably paid a per-user price but licensing changed through the years.  Mapping existing licenses to Fusion won’t be a straightforward exercise, and Oracle hasn’t figured it out just yet.

So when does this roll out?  Oracle isn’t saying, but they are looking for early adopters to start implementing Fusion starting in 2009.