Still catching up.
Ascend and Kscope confirmed for me that Fusion adoption is increasingly shaped by the technology ecosystem around it, particularly OCI, AI, analytics, integration, and the technical skills needed to support change.
At Ascend conference I was speaking in the EBS stream, which I blogged about earlier in the week.
There was a lot of HCM content for Fusion but not as much across the entire suite as I hoped for and possibly because this is my area expertise, I didn't attend many Fusion sessions but did talk to lots of users which teaches me far more.
I was on the panel for the AI Special Interest Group meeting, and it was good to see that organizations are dipping their toes into AI Agents and have embraced at least some of the Generative AI delivered in Fusion.
I also had the chance to talk about AI in Fusion with Connor MacDonald in an Uber which he shared online.
I am really interested in the technology that underpins our applications and I believe that the technical people in an organization that runs Fusion also have the same thirst for knowledge. For those reasons I have been a longtime supporter of ODTUG.We talk about Fusion being sold to the business rather than IT but that doesn't mean the IT team have no role during the implementation. It's incredibly important that they are working with the integration, with the data migration and understanding how they move from where they are today which undoubtedly will have been an on premise and highly maintained by their team.
It may be that SaaS once implemented requires less intervention but in the sales cycle I know that just natural curiosity means these teams want to know what's going on in Fusion and whilst they can't go under the covers to the application database, there is still the integration, the way it works with the rest of their estate, and how data is used before and after the application processes to worry about. Technology is still very important to this community.
I have been on the board of ODTUG for 4 years and campaigned for an OCI community because I believe that that's where that technology lives and I was so happy when ODTUG launched OCI last year.
At the Kscope conference this year we had our first OCI tracks. I was very impressed at the number of technical people who were Fusion users, some were our traditional APEX or Visual Builder developers who are extending Fusion, some from our Analytics community who are using FDI or EPM practitioners who are running it with Fusion and some were net new people who were just coming for the OCI angle.
Some new attendees were also E Business Suite, (EBS) admins assessing what a move to Fusion technically involved.
Feedback we got was they wanted more FDI content. We did had several amazing sessions that explained how AI works and how AI is exposed in Oracle, in OCI, in the applications, in EPM, in Analytics and in Integrations. The presentations really appealed to me as a Fusion practitioner who loves the technology.
What I learnt from the sessions I attended and some of the things that resonated with me in the conversations match what I see with our customers.
For a while most financial users of Fusion have purchased the EPM modules at the same time and there is talk that that link between them will become even tighter.
One presentation I attended talked about implementing FDI at the same time as Fusion and not as a later phase, and especially when an organization is using Finance and Supply Chain, the value of having the analytics from day one drives even better adoption.
One session addressed the AI everywhere in Fusion and partners are delivering agents at pace. But how do organizations know where to start? At Inoapps, we are working with our customers, helping them choose the delivered AI Agents that are relevant for them from Oracle’s portfolio or from the marketplace of partner agents and then what ones do they need to alter or build themselves. Advice I give and echoed by every speaker at Kscope is start small, don't try and produce a massive list to tackle, look at the ones that make sense.
As the board liaison for the OCI Community I also held a town hall jointly with Abi Giles-Haigh who is responsible for the AI Community and we looked at some common threads, starting with skills and the need to stay current.
A significant number of our audience were using or thinking of using Fusion and this validates having the OCI Community and I look forward to growing that in the future under the leadership of Roger Cressey.
