Yesterday Oracle has a major set of presentations around its new Fusion platform to help celebrate the Fusion project’s one year anniversary. The headline for the event was “Oracle is halfway to Fusion.” This is a huge deal as it’s the base for Oracle’s integration of a number of disparate products and technologies from the acquisitions they’ve done in the past two years (PeopleSoft / JD Edwards and Siebel being the most notable.)
Niel Robertson – the CTO at Newmerix – watches this closely as the consolidation in the ERP / packaged application market is a key driver of the opportunity for Newmerix. I asked Niel what he thought and his quick response was:
Imagine if Microsoft came to you and said the following: “We know you like MS-Office. It has some great features. But we really think next gen of OpenOffice is the way to go. Hey, its standards based. And you can extend it with your own functionality. And look, we have this totally cool OpenDoc format. And, we took the best features of word, wordperfect, framemaker, PDF, and anything else you have and we sort of merged it all together. Well, some of the features won’t be there. Like sub-bullet points. They didn’t make it. And track changes will work totally differently. And folders in outlook won’t be able to be organized the same – but pretty close. But hey, its open. And oh yeah, we’ll give you some tools to convert all your word, PPT, outlook, excel, etc.. over. But you can’t bring anything based on a template (like PPT slides) or any custom formatting you have done in your documents and tables of contents in PDFs won’t work anymore. But don’t worry, all word processors and office tools go through a 7 year evolution – it’s totally normal.” Now take this conversation and consider how many word, ppt, pdf, excel docs you have alone. Then consider rolling this out to 45,000 people in your organization. Ahhh! It’s a total mess.
It kind of reminds me of Microsoft’s Project Green. Expect more on this from Niel on his blog.