(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.