The problem with massively hyperbolic rivalries and the PR campaigns that go with them is that a lot of useful information gets lost in the froth and FUD. In the case of the megarivalry between SAP and Oracle, it often seems that too much ink and too many pixels have been spent on the hows and whys of migrating from one rival to the other—sort of a high-tech version of Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover."
This ongoing battle of the press releases, for many CIOs, has been as useful as a divorce lawyer in a maternity ward. Instead of separation advice, these CIOs—who are heavily invested in PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Siebel—need some good coexistence advice. Indeed, one of the enduring questions posed to me by these customers since Oracle began its buying spree boils down to one essential issue: How do we innovate over the next two to five years without a major migration and without necessarily taking sides in the war between Oracle and SAP?
One prospect for innovation without migration comes from Oracle's certification program for its Fusion Middleware technology. Certification means that Fusion Middleware can get data from PeopleSoft applications, for instance. Customers can now use the Oracle Portal for desktop-level integration and single sign-on, and they can build extensions in Java to their existing legacy applications and run them in Fusion Middleware. They can also, to a limited extent, use "virtualized" Web services from their older applications to build composite applications that can also run in a Fusion Middleware environment.
This means that if a PeopleSoft customer has a compelling business case for single sign-on or business users need a new custom application that has to access a variety of internal and external services today—and still be useful five years from now—Fusion Middleware might be a place to start. And if a customer is looking to rationalize some IT management and functionality by standardizing on a single application server environment, certification makes Fusion Middleware a candidate.
Are these reasons enough to pick Fusion Middleware? Business cases are notoriously variable, so there's no easy answer. Choosing Fusion Middleware is definitely a start down the road toward adopting the full Fusion strategy—but it's not a door that closes behind you once you crack it open in the first place. A customer could also rationalize a Fusion Middleware implementation as a short-term placeholder until the dust clears on the rest of the Fusion product stack and some clarity emerges in the SAP/Oracle war.
Either way, at least there's a path to innovation for these customers that makes sense. It's not the only one by a long shot, but it's one that's based on the synergy Oracle has promised its new customers for more than a year now. And you can't fault a vendor for delivering on at least some of its promises, even if much of the rest is still in the "wait and see" category.
Josh Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting, has 20 years of experience in the industry as a computer programmer, systems analyst, author, and consultant. His column appears monthly.
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