(photo mine, use with cc attribution licence) Hotel Fusion, San Francisco.

I’m just back home from a trip to California. I attended Oracle Open World, and had several other meetings in the bay area. 

I saw the Keynote presentation, and on the next day  I spent an hour or so with the leaders of HCM product Fusion product. Colleagues of mine here at Gartner have spent more time getting a deeper look, so I will leave the detailed product analysis to them for now. No doubt I will learn more over the next few months, but at the event I was more focused on getting to grips with PeopleSoft 9.1 and catching up on progress of EBS 12.1.

I have read quite a bit about Fusion over the last few days on twitter and on blogs, some of it thoughtful, some of it wishful and some of it rude. 

My thoughts.

Larry Ellison spent most of the keynote talking about hardware, with the odd barb aimed at IBM.

(photo via Oracle’s cc flickrstream. thanks)

He left Fusion right until the end.

It was enough of a look to show that it is relatively close to being done, or at least significantly further along than halfway. Larry outlined the scope, and mentioned some of its innovations. The demo was adequate without being awesome. It set some expectations, but it didn’t promise a new form of sliced bread. What Larry didn’t do is pontificate on how much revenue this thing will do. No suggestions of 10,000 customers, or billions of dollars of revenue. He didn’t promise much at all, other than a vague some time next year. 

He generated interest, but not enough to put a freeze on PeopleSoft 9.1 and EBS 12.1 upgrades. 

It would have been nice to see a bit more, but Oracle is in no rush. Oracle has the Sun acquisition to complete and digest, so I’d expect Fusion get more of push once Oracle has Sun on board and aligned.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Fusion comes shipped on its own special piece of hardware.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I’d suggest you read the whole post here.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know poet.  She never knew her father.  She is considered by historians to be the first programmer. Charles Babbage called her the Enchantress of Numbers. The programming language ADA is named after her.

The software industry is relatively new, yet is it more male dominated than most other industries. This doesn’t reflect well on the industry. And we have no excuse.There should be no place for misogyny.

The software industry would be stronger and a better place  if we all could encourage more women to see their future in technology, we are missing out on the next ADA. Showcasing role models rather than just models is a damn good place to start doing our bit to address this inequality.  I’d urge all my readers to sign up here. Over a thousand people have done so.

The German IT market has its own quirks and nuances. SAP looms even larger than it does in other markets, so I expect lots of discussions and mutterings on SAP’s maintenance moves.  I’ve had quite a few calls and meetings  with German CIO’s recently, and they are feeling more than a tad grumpy about the changes. I heard words that expand my German vocabulary but  are not suitable for a family blog.

Gartner subscribers may want to read Peter and Alexa’s note, Guidelines for Responding to SAP’s Increased Maintenance Fees (G00162411), 05-NOV-2008.

Clients are concerned about the significant cost impact of SAP’s new Enterprise Support offering, and have struggled to distill the benefits commensurate with the increase in fees. Gartner offers a six-step plan of action to help clients improve their situation with SAP.

The agenda has something of a green theme. As a society, "green" is not a new thing in Germany, it has been going on for decades, so the Germans have a good nose for Greenwash. 

The presenters are a mix of international and German analysts.

It will also be an opportunity to catch up with my German Colleagues. A conference half an hour’s drive away up the autobahn. Sweet. We have a merry band of German based analysts. Andy Bitterer, Carsten Casper, Martin Gutberlet, Christian Hestermann, Martina Kurth, Mick MacComacaigh, Frank Ridder, me, Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Jürgen Weiss, Peter Wesche, and Annette Zimmermann.  Many of them will be at the event.

In between my rather hectic travels, I’m working on figuring out my research agenda for 2009. I’ve not written anything about SAP since I joined, but now that I have some more personal distance, I hope to play a more active role in the SAP coverage at Gartner. These are interesting times.

If you would like to attend the event, Details here.

Photo from the excellent cc stream of pupski.thanks.

I’ve not posted much recently, I’d been meaning to post on HR tech, but several other blogs have done an excellent job of summarising the event(See Brian, Larry,Jim, Bill, Jason, HRmarketer and Zach for starters).

I have been thinking a lot about integration recently. I’m back from HR Tech, and Jim and I are in the middle of the employee performance management magic quadrant process. I’m hearing a whole lot about integrated talent management at the moment. The list of ‘unique’ integrated solutions is now rather long. Someone listening in from another planet would think that word unique means we do the same stuff the other guys are talking about.

HCM vendors of all varieties are talking about how they have integrated the stuff together that they own. My succession talks to my performance, my performance talks to my development, my development talks to my learning and so on.  Yes this is all good stuff.

I’ve spent some time this week talking with several multinationals here in Europe. They are also asking lots of questions about integration.

The integration they are worried about is a different one.

They are concerned how to connect their talent management applications to the rest of their applications. They are worried about building parallel universes. Silo 2.0.

HR IT leaders are beginning to realize that they need to learn a whole lot about data governance, data semantics and masterdata management. Chucking a CSV file over the firewall and hoping for the best isn’t really going to cut it. Managing and syncing core HR organisation data is what will keep HR IT awake.

It is good to see vendors getting their own applications talking to each other, but I sense they have been neglecting the real customer challenge. HCM applications should work closely with the rest of the business applications out there.

Vendors that focus and take responsibility for integration beyond applications they build. Now that would be unique.

(photo taken by me, use with cc attribution with pleasure)

I snapped this photo at the Ladenburg Altstadtfest this weekend. (Ladenburg is a small town near Heidelberg, Germany, where I live.)  I will be spending the first part of next week at the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco.  I cover the HR technology space at Gartner, so understanding what Oracle is up to in this space is an important part of my job.  I’ll be getting an up date on the latest in EBS and PeopleSoft, and perhaps perhaps perhaps some details on Fusion.  I’m sure these guys will keep me busy.

If you are planning to be at the event, drop me a note, email or twitter will do.  I’m especially interested in catching up with customers. For those using Twitter, there is an OWW hash string. #OOW08

My colleagues have published several pieces on Oracle recently. Have a look at this for a start. A Guide to Oracle Research for Applications Leaders

Having attended many SAP events over the years, it will be fascinating to see how Oracle run their major event of the year. That said, my main focus is going to be looking past the show and at the applications themselves. Understanding the roadmaps of the big vendors is not easy.  I hope that my visit to San Francisco will help clear some of my fogginess.

I need to dash back on Tuesday evening, as I’m presenting at a Gartner EXP CIO event in Zürich.  I’ll be talking on my pet topic of the emerging field of HR analytics and why it is important.  Other speakers include CIOs from ABB, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Bank, Siemens Health Care.  My colleague Nick Jones will also be speaking on key trends for Wireless devices, but I wonder if this includes RC planes. I’m also looking forward to hearing John Mahooney’s talk on scenario planning, as this is a topic that really interests me.

After that, I’m back in the home office for a few days, and then I’ll be off to Infor’s conference in Vegas, and also popping in to HR Tech in Chicago. I’ll be learning a lot more about Infor’s products and strategy, not just for the HCM space.  HR Tech is the premier HR Tech conference in the US, and I’m keen to catch up with old and new faces at conference. Bill Kutik runs a great show, I’m told.  Also I hope to catch up with Jason Corsello, who writes the excellent Human Capitalist blog.  Several vendors have asked to meet with me there, but I also would like to talk with users.  I’ll especially interested in learning about.

1. actual usage of 2.0 technologies in an HR context. (rather than simply talking about it)

2. Using sophisticated analytics on HR data

3. Integrating SaaS and non-SaaS applications.

4. Global deployments of talent management processes such as compensation and succession planning.

5. Administrative application strategy. BPO, shared services, HR-Finance integration..

In the meantime I also need to start writing up some of my research.  Now would be a good time.

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