Fusion Applications Seen Up Close
I took a day trip up the coast to Oracle HQ today. The purpose of the trip was to attend a special demo of Oracle Fusion Applications; a capstone to the Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management Design Validation project Oracle conducted with a small group of customers, including the Jet Propulsion Lab. I saw up close what will eventually evolve into Fusion Applications Version 1.0. Not a PowerPoint deck of slides, not non-functional or semi-functional prototypes, but the real honest-to-goodness applications. Not in a live production environment, but a live demo environment...akin to the "Vision" demo instance for the E-Business Suite. I witnessed execution of transactions, data input, and drill-downs from analytics into transactional detail. Some observations I made and conclusions I drew as a result of today's experience:
Fusion Applications are real...period. If you read anything about "vaporware" or "not real" or "far from completion", recognize it for what it is...baloney. If I were numbering my iterations or versions prior to a 1.0 release, I'd put what I saw today at roughly about version 0.7 or 0.8 ...but that's strictly a rough, speculative guess on my part, and is definitely not the means by which the Fusion development team is tracking their progress (By the way, I have nothing to share on actual progress against plans or release dates. If I had it to share, I would...but I don't, so I won't. There's enough speculation on the release date and plans without me pouring any more fuel on the fire).
Although the user interface is different from anything we've seen before, it's very intuitive. In addition, although the information presented through the user interface varies from application to applications, the manner in which the user interface works is fairly consistent across applications. It's definitely next-generation in terms of the way users will relate to the applications.
There is a big emphasis on Web 2.0 concepts: easy...
