There are two pieces of content that I’ve come across in the last few days:

Firstly, there’s a mention for Floyd Teter who has seen Fusion Apps in the flesh.

Secondly, it seems that Oracle’s “Mr Fusion” has left the company.

When I posted a year or so ago that I’d heard Jesper Andersen say that the Fusion Applications suite wouldn’t GA until 2009 there was a fair bit of feedback (to put it politely – I even had to edit one comment for profanity), but now it seems more likely that Jesper was correct.

How much we read into this Gartner report is up to our own faith in Oracle, but statements like

‘Oracle plans to only sell Fusion to new customers and that “migrating the installed base to Fusion is no longer a near-term goal”.’

and

‘the 2008 Fusion applications will not include any core ERP products’

don’t fill me with confidence that we’ll see clients implementing Fusion any time soon.

It’s great news though for anyone hoping that the PeopleSoft product line remains around for a long time.

I must admit that I haven’t listened to the WebCast myself (to be honest I didn’t think there’d be much there that affects PeopleSoft in the short term) but after reading summary posts on a couple of other blogs it seems I was wrong.

The most surprising announcement for me was that going forward

“BEA WebLogic Server is now Oracle’s strategic JEE container and will be integrated into Fusion Middleware stack immediately; OC4J dev to continue though”

This was a bit of a shock as I expected Oracle App Server to be slowly pushed as the Web Server of choice. It’s a change of tack too as in many ‘prepare now to get a headstart for Fusion’ presentations I’ve got the impression that clients should be implementing what they perceive to be Fusion middleware components now, and I’d have had Oracle App Server down as one of those applications.

Antony Reynolds also says:

“But the surprising bit was the emphasis that Thomas Kurian made on Tuxedo. It seems as though the Tuxedo guys are being rehabilitated after years in the wilderness at BEA since the WebLogic acquisition. I was amazed at the increase in connectivity and functionality that has occurred in Tux since I last came into contact with it some ten years ago.”

I’ve tried to view the webcast to find out exactly what’s behind this but can’t seem to view it. I’ll post more if I can get it working …

EDIT: Mulling this over further, I think the decision to use WebLogic over Oracle’s own product is good news for the other acquisitions. If Oracle is willing to use a product that it deigns is superior instead of just using its own product ‘because it’s Oracle’ then that bodes well for any areas of functionality within PeopleSoft, Siebel etc that may be better than corresponding areas of eBusiness suite.

Press Release on Yahoo News

“The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle’s Fusion middleware software suite,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle Fusion middleware has an open “hot-pluggable” architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA’s WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That’s just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come.”

I attended the following:

• Synchronous Messaging and Web Services in PeopleTools 8.48
• Getting a file into PeopleSoft for processing
• Developing a strategy for PeopleSoft Global Payroll bundles
• Operational Excellence with PeopleSoft Version Control
• PeopleSoft Application Classes – Easing the Path to Fusion

Synchronous Messaging and Web Services in PeopleTools 8.48 by Graham Smith

We’ve all seen the wide array of acronyms that surround the area of Web Services/messaging. Graham explained which of those matters to us, briefly stepped through an overview of the changes in Integration Broker in 8.48+, then stepped through a live demo of creating a CI, creating the services, operations, messages etc using the CI Service Wizard, generated the WDSL and showed a utility called SoapUI to interact with the Service from outside of PeopleSoft. With the time available Graham exposed the Get and Find methods but it wouldn’t take a huge amount of extra time to open up create and save methods also.

Getting a file into PeopleSoft for processing by Steve Smith

I must admit I was reticent to attend this session as from the title I expected it to be just discussing AddAttachment PeopleCode, and I’d already used that many times before. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Steve and his colleagues at Cambridge University have taken file uploading considerably further than this and showcased some good ideas. Additional functionality they’ve added includes:

• duplicate file checking
• checksum based duplicate checking
• file locking during processing / on error
• upload file size limit
• upload file type restriction

I’m sure there was more, but at the time of writing Steve’s powerpoint isn’t available on the UKOUG website so I can’t fill in the gaps in this list.

Developing a strategy for PeopleSoft Global Payroll bundles by Chris Smith & Simon Coyle

Continuing the unintentional theme of attending presentations by people called Smith, I thought I’d come and hear Chris and Simon speak. I’ve been on some Global Payroll implemenations and have also worked (very briefly) with Chris before so came along to see what experience they had to share. The advice was:

• Change Assistant is broadly a good thing, which is something I’ve also found myself – it has improved since its first incarnation in Tools 8.44 – though Chris and Simon did mention something that many will have found – that the file copy is far slower than doing it manually.
• Treat bundles as a mini upgrade (freeze development, apply the changes, then make the users test it)
• There are a lot of bundles out there, particularly as GP customers should be applying HR bundles in addition to the GP ones (as there is some crossover in areas the patches apply to). The advice given was to stay no more than 3 GP bundles from current and when you do apply them, combine the bundles into a mini maintenance pack. Also, there are no GP country bundles any more – they’re rolled in to the GP Core ones – so you end up with fewer, but larger bundles to apply.

Operational Excellence with PeopleSoft Version Control by Chris Heller

It’s always great to hear the Grey Sparling guys talk as they’ve a wealth of experience with the product and an engaging presentation style. I always come away with at least one gem of knowledge that I wouldn’t have found any other way than attending one of their sessions. Most of what Chris spoke about is achievable with Open Source software (the hugely popular Subversion), although to fully leverage what you’ve implemented you’d probably need their PS IDE Helper product.

The need for version control is pretty clear as that which ships with the product is pretty lightweight and although some customers purchase another commercial product (like Stat) in some of the cases I’ve seen it just remains unused on the shelf. The solution that Chris suggests was a half-way house, it is lower cost but contains a good deal of the functionality that you’d need. An unexpected bonus for me was the ability to point multiple Process Schedulers at virtual SQR directory hosted within Subversion – thereby reducing the need to keep multiple repositories in sync (you’d obviously have to watch out that a development SQR doesn’t get read by the Production Process Scheduler though). Probably most use on larger implementations, but good stuff all the same.

PeopleSoft Application Classes – Easing the Path to Fusion by Simon Huggins

Simon is an ex-colleague of mine and tackling Application Classes (especially in the last session of the day) was always going to be a big ask. He managed to keep it fairly jovial by abstracting it from a business context and even gave out a prize at one point when someone correctly identified a quote as being from Monty Python. We ran out of time when there were many slides left to show but Simon has posted his full presentation here to allow us to catch up.

A link to the presentations will be on Part 2 (Wednesday).

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/11/oracle_fusion_delivery_2009/

Not being n Oracle Apps person, I’m not sure what the absence of mod_plsql in Fusion means … with PL/SQL being Oracle only, could it be a pointer that Fusion is going to be database-independent after all?

Finally, is the reliance on Java and XML going to leave us with a product that’s a real drain on hardware? John Stouffer (co-chairman of the OAUG’s Fusion Council) recently warned of exponential database growth.

Interesting …

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/03/oracle_uk_users_survey/ 

Apparently “Customers’ opinion of Oracle’s licensing has hit a new low in the UK while the company’s Fusion plans remain a mystery to half of its users”.

The good news is that satisfaction with PeopleSoft is still very high (up to 75%).

It seems as though the first applications out of the Fusion stable are all going to be CRM related. According to Larry’s keynote, the first three will be sales prospector, sales references and sales tools.

Possibly of more interest was that we’ve had a glimpse of an answer to the ‘what database platforms will Fusion support’ question. It turns out that it’s going to vary for each application. Larry spoke about Financials and said that it’s going to be Oracle, plus DB2 (providing IBM build in some features that Oracle are requesting). There was no word on the other modules.

The best exchange was possibly this one though:

“We will have a Fusion version for every application,” Ellison stated. “So you’re moving off these brands (PeopleSoft, Siebel etc)?” he was asked, LArry responded “No, well yes – by 2025.”

Article here:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/11/15/ellison_audience_smack_down/

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the ‘Head of Fusion’ John Wookey left amidst talk of a fall-out with Larry Ellison.  Apparently “Oracle was trying to woo him back, though the circumstances around Wookey’s departure have not been confirmed.“

Now it appears that there is some backtracking – or at least redefining phrases from earlier statements – to allow for delays in the release.  Seeing as we are only a couple of months away from the New Year, surely a release date a little more precise than between Jan 1st and Dec 31st 2008 should be possible?

It’s not as if we expect the full suite of Apps on that date.  I would anticipate something more akin to the PeopleSoft Version 9.0 release, where a smallish module (was it ELM?) came out first with much fanfare about ‘Oracle meeting schedules to release PeopleSoft v9.0′, and then the main modules (HR, Financials etc) drip-fed out months later.

There’s been a bit of talk today about Oracle’s Project X. It’s been bubbling around for a while, but now it has been officially announced as ‘Oracle Application Integration Architecture’ and – to paraphrase – it’s a method of joining together disparate ERP systems.

By purchasing Process Integration Packs (PIPs) clients will be able to connect systems – initially I’d imagine it would be PeopleSoft, Oracle e-Biz, Siebel and JDE, but other systems will no doubt be added in the fullness of time. This is, of course, a high visibility use of the much heralded SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) – one of the buzzwords you can’t avoid hearing in any Fusion discussion. I guess this is Oracle responding to customers saying ‘enough with the SOA/BPEL/XMLP tub-thumping, show me how it improves my business’.

What does it mean for PeopleSoft people?

Whenever Oracle come out with a big announcement, the first question for me is always ‘what does this mean for the PeopleSoft world’? After all, straight after the takeover Oracle announced that we’d all be forced to migrate to Fusion. Then we were going to be temporarily supported on our current ERPs before migrating. Next came Applications Unlimited, meaning we could hold fire a bit longer. Now, Oracle release a technology enabling us to not migrate to Fusion at all, but stay put and let the different ERPs communicate.

A cynic might wonder if they were having problems with Fusion. Or perhaps it’s all going swimmingly but they’re hearing that clients quite like their current systems and don’t want to move? Or are they just after the extra revenue stream PIP sales would bring before Fusion comes along?