Fusion Applications at Collaborate 2014

Many of you will be aware that R8 Fusion Applications went GA just before Collaborate 2014, this product is out there and being used.

I’m often asked about the adoption of Fusion Applications and Oracle will give you numbers about how many people have now purchased it, but I’m sharing my thoughts and how Collaborate left me feeling very excited about the adoption curve.

The early adopters of Fusion Applications have spoken about their experience and yes they had one-to-one help, direct links into development and project success managers as part of the programme so the more cynical can believe that they had to talk about Fusion Apps positively. But that programme is long over, the next wave of adopters were those buying either on premise or on demand and because of the complex technology these projects were quite long unless the customer already had that technology stack in place. Then in the last year there has been the availability of Fusion Applications in the cloud. This has opened the market up to those who don’t want or who are frightened by the technology, those who want just a small slice of Fusion Applications which didn’t warrant a large project and those simply adopting a cloud strategy.

There were lots of organisations talking about all these scenarios at Collaborate2014. I was really encouraged and excited by the sheer numbers live, in implementation or planning their Fusion Applications adoption, I even talked to customers who have upgraded their releases. Yes some had had challenges but they are challenges that affect most IT projects not just Fusion Applications and there was a lot of best practice appearing. Yes some are looking for enhancements and some struggled coming to terms with the new technology but all agree Fusion Applications themselves have delivered what was promised and a superior user experience.

 

But rather than merely explain in detail here watch my interview with Dennis Howlett from  Diginomica where he not only captures my words but also my excitement. Thank you Den for the opportunity and the excellent blog that he wrote about the interview.

I look forward to all open world and hearing from more customers

N.B in the video and quoted as saying release eight was imminent in fact release eight come out before collaborate 2014 but for some cloud customers the upgrade was still imminent which was the context in which I said it. Apologies for any confusion