Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Open Sources | InfoWorld | Oracle: No Fusion (yet) | January 31, 2007 12:38 PM | By Matt Asay
Open Sources InfoWorld Oracle: No Fusion (yet) January 31, 2007 12:38 PM By Matt Asay: "It's clear from looking at Oracle's numbers that maintenance revenues are becoming a bigger and more important slice of the pie, and, if I were inside Oracle betting on cashing in my options, I'd be placing every resource I could on making sure those Big Four applications were up to date and their customers loving it.
It's also clear to me that no matter how solidly behind Fusion Oracle is today, or how groovy the prototypes look in six months, a solid Fusion-based revenue stream isn't very likely for a number of years. Mostly because it's going to be hard to justify going with Fusion 1.0: Even if Oracle does a bang-up job first time around, the 1.0 curse will keep a lot of customers on the fence waiting for the 1.0 pioneers to debug the software well-enough to make 2.0 the real GA release....
But the 2009 timeframe does mean that customers sitting on the fence about where they are going to be in three years with Oracle are paying a lot for their uncertainty: at 22% of their license fee, the maintenance costs for most customers will have paid by 2009 will be darn close to their original license cost, if they haven't already topped the 100% mark by then....[A]ny Applications Unlimited customer looking to truly cut costs and streamline the IT budget has to ask him or herself what price that uncertainty might be costing. "
It's also clear to me that no matter how solidly behind Fusion Oracle is today, or how groovy the prototypes look in six months, a solid Fusion-based revenue stream isn't very likely for a number of years. Mostly because it's going to be hard to justify going with Fusion 1.0: Even if Oracle does a bang-up job first time around, the 1.0 curse will keep a lot of customers on the fence waiting for the 1.0 pioneers to debug the software well-enough to make 2.0 the real GA release....
But the 2009 timeframe does mean that customers sitting on the fence about where they are going to be in three years with Oracle are paying a lot for their uncertainty: at 22% of their license fee, the maintenance costs for most customers will have paid by 2009 will be darn close to their original license cost, if they haven't already topped the 100% mark by then....[A]ny Applications Unlimited customer looking to truly cut costs and streamline the IT budget has to ask him or herself what price that uncertainty might be costing. "
