Welcome to our Project Fusion page. This is similar to our PeopleSoft 9 page. What is Fusion? Fusion is rumored to be the codename for the first merged version of PeopleSoft and Oracles technology. It will be released after PeopleSoft 9 has been deployed for a while.

Fusion is meant to be the major competitor to SAP and most analysts are watching to see if Oracle can pull it off. This is where it is meant to all come together. If fusion is not successful, if it is buggy, if customers start to reject the premise, all is lost. The merger would have been for naught and SAP will officially be the ERP king. If Fusion is successful and customers embrace it, SAP will be in trouble. Oracle-PeopleSoft will have justified their merger and will be set to take on SAP both in North America and in Europe.

In our opinion, Oracle has to do several things in order to make Fusion a success.

Keep or enhance the PeopleSoft GUI (Graphical User Interface) and look and feel. Ego aside, Oracle should admit that the PeopleSoft GUI is for the most part excellent and intuitive and (here's the tough part) better than the Oracle application GUI. Current customers love and are used to the P.I.A. (PeopleSoft Internet Architecture).

Keep it simple. That has always been one of PeopleSoft's (few) advantages over SAP. It is a relatively simple tool to use but very powerful. One of the potential pitfalls of a fusion type product would be that Oracle will try to cram one million new tools into this product. This would turn off developers and customers. In the end, enterprises want tools that are simple, powerful, secure, scalable and upgradeable.

Three letters: A S P.  Software as a service is a reality. To win in the ERP market, you have to be able to sell to large clients as well as smaller and medium sized companies. Selling through the ASP (Application Service Provider) channel is a vital source of revenue for software companies. In addition, we at PSP believe that as the ASP model matures, more and more large companies will abandon traditional implementation and deployment models and look to ASP's for their applications.

Security Integration is key. With ERP tools getting more complex, companies like Oblix and Netegrity have made a bundle of cash selling their consultants and  packages to ERP clients. If PeopleSoft Fusion had industry standard security tools built in, that would be very attractive to their client base. Security is an issue that will continue to plague the ERP market for a long time. The software companies that are able to keep client data secure will triumph in the long run.

Create unbeatable integration. This one's easy. Oracle needs to create world class integration with this application. CRM to HR to Financials to Manufacturing should be as simple as plugging and playing. In addition, integration with the database platform should be airtight. We are talking about Oracle here, there can be no excuses. PeopleSoft implementations usually require a lot of database tuning and indexing etc. If there were guarantees that a lot of indexes were already in place, built and fine tuned, this would be very attractive to clients.

Finally, Drop the price. At the end of the day, the price wars will be an integral piece of the puzzle. If Oracle PeopleSoft can pull everything off then radically drop the price, it will make a lot of SAP clients reconsider. Having personally worked with both SAP and PeopleSoft, we believe that in the coming years, Oracle will have a unique opportunity to give SAP a run for their money.

Only time will tell...