Comparing NetSuite and Salesforce

I was at a user meeting with NetSuite in Boston earlier this week.  The company has bought two companies since going public — OpenAir and QuickArrow — both of which support the professional services market.  Companies sell things as well as services and CRM has been applied most successfully to the former.  Companies that sell services have been left to their own devices to figure out how to automate and manage sales and delivery and their situation resembles that of the thing-sellers pre-SFA.

NetSuite’s idea is an integrated solution combining ERP and services oriented planning and sales modules going by the name of SRP — services resource planning — and the idea has legs.

As you can imagine there are some significant differences between selling things and selling projects.  Most importantly, services companies have bigger issues with fixed overhead because you have to have smart people on staff if you expect to sell their time.  Economists might say that supply is inelastic or certainly less elastic for the services guys than for the companies that can throttle up or down the manufacturing process.

All this got me thinking not about the two different types of selling but about the two different styles of building a company exhibited by Salesforce.com and NetSuite.  Both companies have purchased other companies when it made sense as a way to build out their offerings.  But each company also has a multi-tenant architecture and a cloud platform, which makes it easy for third parties to build or modify applications.  Nonetheless, if I had to describe each company’s strategy I would say that NetSuite is more likely to buy than make compared to Salesforce — if you include the partners.

Salesforce appears to have decided on an approach that encourages a partner community to build native applications while NetSuite seems to encourage partners to deploy and modify its core solutions though not necessarily build wholly new ones.

Now, this is a rough approximation and it looks more black and white than it is — there is a lot of grey area in all this.  But it drives an interesting question that I believe can’t be answered, at least not now.  Which approach is better?  Should the primary vendor be the only one involved in new product development or should the platform vendor simply let a thousand flowers bloom?  Certainly the existence of the platform makes the second option possible.

Part of the answer can be found in how each vendor views itself.  Salesforce is obviously looking for a big new market to penetrate that’s bigger than CRM and it has selected application development tools for the enterprise and smaller organizations.  NetSuite might have a serviceable platform but for the time being it appears to be more interested in the market for integrated front and back office applications, which is more crowded.

I don’t have any good answers here or prognostications, just these observations.  Salesforce has always been in the business of inventing the future and while they’ve been successful they have had their stumbles along the way too.  Other companies have been content to stick to their knitting, but the future rarely keeps to a script.  There are many markets just opening up, at least in part because there is reliable and low cost software available to support them and that says good things for both companies’ chances.

The big question to ponder is whether there is enough demand for in-house development to support Salesforce’s vision.  It groups are notoriously backlogged and it is unclear to me if the backlog is a result of too much demand or inefficient tools.  For decades we have argued that it is the tools and we’ve seen generation after generation of tools that promised to fix the problem.

Tools are important but if you read “The Black Swan,” which I recommend, you might get the notion that backlogs are inherent in what we do, in part because we do such a poor job of understanding and planning for future requirements.  If so, one of the next logical acquisitions for either Salesforce or NetSuite should be a company that focuses on improving forecasting and planning methods.  Does such an animal even exist?

Rock bottom?

We are all junkies for leading economic indicators.  Whether it’s the first spring swallow or an uptick in orders for semi-conductor fabrication gear, we love to call the start of a new movement, if only because it signals the end of something more prosaic.

So it is now at what appears to be the end of a bad recession and the beginning of a new economic cycle.  The aforementioned semi-conductor sector has done its thing along with house prices and general real estate activity is picking up.

But what about the trailing indicators — those things that take their time going down when the economy hits the skids?  A notorious lagging indicator is always employment.  Companies cut jobs as a last resort in the early stages of a downturn and cautiously re-hire after the first indicators of recovery are in full bloom.

Newspapers and TV talking heads meanwhile wring their hands about a “jobless recovery” as if the economy is spring loaded and able to bounce back with the seeming alacrity and speed of a toy.  They are always surprised at employment latency and the headlines hardly vary from recovery to recovery.

I have my own economic indicator that I watch with guarded optimism at this time of a recovery and fright when the economy seems to be going south.  It is marketing spending and a corollary is the number of people I know in marketing who are out of work and having difficulty finding it.

In late 2007 I began hearing whispers of a housing bubble getting ready to burst and through early 2008 the whispers turned to shouts but marketing spending seemed to be on pace.  Later analysis showed that the recession actually began around the same time as the whispers but marketing spending was resilient.  I recall having lunch with an already out of work CMO in May 2008 and we were musing about the arc of the economy that year.

“Do you think things will pick up in the second half (of 2008)?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said not wanting to deflate him.  “I think we’ll see when we know about marketing spending after July first.”

My idea, which I explained to him, was that the marketing money being spent at that point was loaded into budgets that had a more or less calendar year cycle.  The real test, coming after July first, would be whether companies with June 30 year ends would be as bullish or with six months more perspective, they might pull in their horns.  The distinction is important for our industry because so many companies in the technology sector have June 30 year-ends, thus their marketing spending renews on July first.

At the time, my reading of the tea leaves advised caution because I had not seen the typical run up to a new spending year in the second quarter of 2008.  In other words, fewer companies were asking for quotations, planning programs and the like.  I was right.  The second half of 2008 was slower than the first half and a lack-luster summer gave way to a wild autumn ride on Wall Street that erased doubts about the economy’s direction as well as untold fortunes and more than a few marketing jobs in the technology sector.

The first indicators of renewal have, indeed, been spotted both economy-wide and in the tech sector.  I know of at least one out of work mid-level marketing person who got a job offer last week and several senior people now consulting so there’s that (highly unscientific, I know).  But I still have not seen a general if cautious uptick in marketing spending plans.  This would be the quarter for that to happen if companies are intent on starting the new year with any momentum.

Marketing costs money even in today’s highly automated and socialized marketing world.  There is still time to make plans for early next year even if they get delayed and the first harbingers of revival lead me to think that we are about to see the first tentative steps.  Those chip makers and house builders can’t all be wrong.

On the road (again)

Colorado Springs is an interesting place.  Despite the name there are no “springs” it’s an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park (for sticklers Pikes really should be Pike’s but the official U.S. naming convention eliminates the apostrophe).  The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers.  Good idea, it’s a nice place.

You can ride horseback through the mountains and see abandoned mines and homesteads as well as some rugged natural beauty.  Last time I was there we rode on some trails that were barely wide enough to accommodate our horses.  On one side there was forest and on the other a steep drop off.  RightNow convenes its annual user group meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs next week.  By most accounts it’s been a good year for software, especially SaaS vendors so the meeting should be upbeat.

Other commitments will keep me from attending the RightNow Summit but I look forward to hearing about their announcements.  In general there is an unmistakable move in most areas of CRM, contact centers included, to move more operations to an on-demand footing.  Whether it’s called SaaS, managed or hosted, the call center is moving to simpler surroundings — at least for the client organization, and for good reasons.

Owning and operating a call center is a big and expensive undertaking for a company.  With all phases of the operation in-house, a company has to be able to support multiple subject matter experts from hardware to applications.  The company also has the task of managing an impressive (some would say bewildering) array of gear both telephonic and computer.  The same company also has all of the headaches of recruiting, training and managing a sophisticated workforce.

So, when a vendor comes along offering to take even a portion of that big job over for a fixed price per seat, it draws a lot of attention.  In the not too distant past, the number of vendors willing to make such an offer was limited and RightNow was at the top of the heap.  The market is changing making it easier for vendors to get into the business and the fact that we are even talking about the difference between on-demand, managed and SaaS solutions is evidence of that change.

But it’s not just changing technology that is driving the market.  The core customers, you and me, are smarter and more experienced and we are beginning to draw less from our vendors’ call centers.  Since we’ve all experienced earlier generations of products we are more likely to solve simpler problems with new products ourselves.  Moreover, our recently acquired sophistication with social media makes us more adventurous when it comes to seeking out service and advice from our peers.

It was no surprise to me that RightNow acquired social networking company HiveLive to bolster its efforts in social service offerings.  I look forward to hearing what RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte has to say about his company’s direction in socialized service and support.  Should be an interesting conference.

Also on the docket, the following week Sage Software hosts its user meeting in Atlanta followed by Microsoft holding an analyst briefing in Redmond.  I wish I could make all of these events but they are simply too close together.

Sage is always surprising in part because the company’s business model — selling exclusively through the indirect channel — puts different demands on its products and services.  That has frequently meant that the company has held back on major innovations until its partners were ready to get on board.  But last year, the company announced a 2010 strategy to bring its multiple CRM products under an umbrella that will enable it to achieve greater economies of scale and better integration capabilities with its back office solutions.

Also, Sage recently announced a foray into another on-demand style solution to be delivered early next year.  Their original SageCRM.com notwithstanding, this will be something new for SalesLogix, their high end product.  This is CEO Sue Swenson’s second year at the helm and it was clear at the partner meeting in May that she’s putting her imprint on the company.  She’s tasked senior executives with ambitious plans to update key products and improve partner-facing programs.  It will be interesting to see what end user facing changes are in the offing.

Finally, Microsoft is a very important player in the front and back office applications markets today.  Their analyst meeting in the same week as the Sage user meeting should generate a few headlines and I am eager to hear more about their direction though I will not be able to be there.

All this activity makes me optimistic about next year, and if all this isn’t enough, Intel, AMD and IBM have all reported better than expected financial results for the recently finished quarter.  The semiconductor market has always been a reliable indicator of an upturn in the tech sector and I am hopeful that these results are the first signs of a general economic rebound.  But recovery means more than simply reporting better financial results especially if the increase is from a depressed level caused by recession.  It’s clearly a half full glass but that’s fine with me.

Adobe on a roll (hold the fries)

For the second day in a row Adobe made an important partnering announcement.  Yesterday the company said it had teamed with Salesforce.com to produce Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, which will speed development of Flash-based user interfaces for Salesforce customers.  Today Adobe announced that it has concluded acquisition of Omniture, a web analytics vendor based in Orem, Utah for a whopping $1.8 billion.

It seems an obvious strategy to leverage some of Abobe’s ingredient technologies, like Flash, to make a bigger presence for itself in Cloud Computing.  The addition of web analytics is very interesting.

At this point in the evolution of CRM, if you are not already a big player the chances of starting from scratch and getting big are nugatory so the strategy has to be to buy.  But Adobe’s choice of partnering with a leading CRM company for user interface design and following up with buying analytics is intriguing.  With these two ingredient technologies, Adobe appears to be 1) betting on the future importance of understanding customer moves and motivations and 2) clearly understanding that robust simplicity must rule all software interfaces regardless of platform.

If you ask me, these are two good bets.  While there are clearly many good analytics products on the market either freestanding or embedded in business applications, my research tells me that regular users are still too confused about analytics to fully leverage them.  Ask ten people in our industry the difference between reporting and analytics and you will see what I mean.

My quibble with analytics and analytics vendors generally is that few acknowledge the effort required to capture good data.  Too often the MO is to capture large samples and get some averages, a good but not great approach that, in another setting, once left a bemused Benjamin Disraeli to list three categories of lies, “Lies, damn lies and statistics”.  There’s no substitute for understanding demographics, biases, attitudes and the like to better predict behavior.  Here’s hoping that Adobe gets it and uses Omniture to go the more rigorous route.

Fusion applications decide an argument, sort of

With Oracle’s announcement of Fusion applications, you can make a reasonable case that Salesforce.com has won an important ten-year old argument about the future of the software industry.  Notwithstanding SAP, the only significant outlier left, Oracle is the last major software company to adopt on-demand computing as a centerpiece thus awarding legitimacy and critical mass once and for all to the idea.

Amen.

But the Oracle announcement says more about business models than technology paradigms and at the model level it is not clear that Salesforce has won.  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s vision of business applications delivered over the internet has won an important victory but the business model — subscription services — that makes this technology the center of the movement and exclusive delivery mechanism has not eliminated all competition.  Not yet, at any rate.

The reasons are simple enough, market reticence generated by concerns — both real and imaginary — about security or the viability of the technology model still hamper full adoption of the business model.  As a result, companies as diverse as Oracle, Microsoft and Sage have hedged their bets by offering technology that can be implemented in numerous ways including on-demand as well as by conventional deployments.  As a result vendors have effectively thrown the business model decision over the wall to the customer.

With software capable of, shall we say, polymorphous deployment, the ultimate decision about how to deploy now becomes the exclusive province of the customer as the vendors have now turned into Solomon or, in a modern interpretation, Burger King.  Customers are completely free to have it their way or ways.  They can deploy business applications in a fully SaaS configuration or in hybrid ways that are to a lesser extent owned and operated by the IT department.  As I have noted before, this is typical transition state behavior of vendors straddling two diverse paradigms.

It is no surprise that adoption of the business model lags adoption of the technology.  It has always been true that conversion from traditional software licensing to SaaS is a big step and one that for many software companies could lead to financial ruin if not handled expertly.  More to the point, there are customers who, for reasons of security, custom and preference believe that SaaS computing is not for them, at least not now.

So it is no surprise therefore that the most successful SaaS companies are those that, like Salesforce, grew organically from on-demand roots.  Other successful SaaS companies like Oracle bought their way into SaaS computing, a time honored tradition when adopting new models.

Even before Oracle’s Fusion announcement at Open World this month, the company had been a player in SaaS based CRM with Oracle CRM On-Demand due to its earlier acquisition of Siebel Systems.  But it remains to be seen if any software vendor can fully realize the benefits of SaaS — and now Cloud Computing without full emersion into the technology model.

One of the most powerful aspects of SaaS computing is not the idea of subscriptions or even Internet delivery but of a single version of the applications supporting all users.  With a single version of the code, all users have the same foundation on which to configure, modify and build new applications.  The single code set — also called multi-tenant architecture — makes it hugely unlikely that any two independent software makers would develop incompatible applications and therein lays the power of the business model.

This single idea makes it highly likely that applications built to the standards of the foundation — or platform as we like to call it — will be able to inter-operate.  Take this standard away and you have the same Babel of competing standards and proprietary designs that have been the bain of the software industry.  There is a cost associated with this lack of standardization and software customers have been paying it for decades — with rising resentment.

That cost is not measured strictly monetarily; there is opportunity cost involved too.  When everyone played by the same conventional software rules the opportunity cost problem was equivalent to a farmer experiencing bad weather.  But SaaS computing eliminates the weather variable giving a big advantage to companies under its umbrella.  So it is ironic that the decision about adoption is still left to taste.

With most of the hybrid products, the same code can be deployed in a conventional multi-tenant way or as a standalone system behind a traditional firewall.  The segregated system becomes a unique instance the moment a developer modifies the platform.  Doing that makes the idea of standards a waste of time.

But for the time being — and I am still calling it a transition state — we can expect to see a lot of deployments in which the software is SaaS ready but the deployment is decidedly twentieth century.  In the next five to ten years we will see examples of companies trying to back out of their proprietary SaaS-like systems to finally get on board with SaaS or Cloud Computing.  It will all have been avoidable and it will be good business for software consultants.

As Kurt would say, “So it goes.”

Salesforce and Adobe go to market

Salesforce.com and Adobe jointly announced that they have developed a product called Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com.  The product enables developers to build powerful UIs for the Force.com platform.

Flash is a good thing.  It provides an attractive and powerful UI environment that makes applications more intelligent, robust and fun to use.  Salesforce partners have used Adobe Flash for several years and many have already deployed next generation applications using Flash interfaces.  Today’s announcement confirms the partners’ decisions to use flash and gives Salesforce further evidence of the openness of its platform strategy.

The press release says in part, “This tight integration (of Adobe and Force.com) enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform.

This may be reading too much into the announcement but one wonders about the importance of “seamlessly running online or offline across operating systems and devices.”  I am assuming this refers to the ability to operate on mobile devices but I need clarification.

Economics of sales forecasting

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them.

There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it and I don’t want to leave anything out but I will try to be brief.  First off, how we forecast says a lot about our views on economics.  Given that most of us are not economists, our views of economy are most likely derived from what we see and hear on a daily basis, much like our view of the weather.

For over thirty years our view of economics has been increasingly colored by the ascendant views of the New- or Neo-Classical school of economics.  To over simplify, it is a view that goes back to Adam Smith, of supply and demand and a belief that economics is a hard science governed by equations as rigorous as Newtonian physics — wishful thinking I’m afraid.

The most germane idea for our purposes is Say’s Law.  Say was a French economist, very much in the Classical school who said that “production creates its own demand” and from that we derive the famous supply side economics of the last thirty years.  Supply side economics corresponded nicely with another phenomenon in our world, the introduction of the CPU chip in 1968 and the cascade of new products that ensued over the coming forty years, roughly the high-tech era.

Increasing CPU power followed Gordon Moore’s famous dictum, now Moore’s Law, of increasing CPU power and decreasing cost, and it created a special circumstance that governed supply and demand for technology goods.  Moore’s Law made Say’s Law work like a charm.  A corollary to Say is that all markets clear, i.e. all supply is eventually absorbed at some price — but maybe not a premium price.

Moore’s Law ensured that a fresh supply of technology goods that superseded the earlier generation would arrive and drive demand thus ensuring Say’s Law would operate as advertised.  But if Say’s Law requires something like Moore’s Law to operate smoothly, then it must be said that Say’s Law is a special case, not an iron clad law of economics.

What’s that got to do with sales forecasting?  Quite a bit.  In the special case of selling into a market with undiminished demand, sales forecasting need not be a lot more complicated than determining where we are in the sales cycle.  If we’re ninety percent through the cycle we ask for the order and there is a reasonable chance that we will get the business — no guarantee, but a reasonable chance.

It hardly matters that our ninety percent is not really a probability derived statistically but really just a milestone in a process.  In an expanding market there are enough deals percolating that reasonably diligent effort will result in on-quota performance.  But on-quota performance is not what it once was and forecasting is in disrepute in many places.

According to Jim Dickey and Barry Trailer at CSO Insights, only about fifty-eight percent of sales people manage to make or exceed quota.  Also, according to my research less than ten percent of sales forecasts have an accuracy of ninety percent; the rest aren’t worth the time and effort it takes to compile them.

What’s happening to sales forecasting is not surprising.  With Moore’s Law slowing down and with so many formerly new market niches filled with products, we are transitioning from an era of expanding markets to one of zero-sum conditions.  In a zero-sum situation, if you are going to win business you need to do it by displacing another product.  If you are a customer in a displacement game it is always easy to do nothing and wait for a better offer and continue using an existing product that might not have all the bells and whistles you want but fills the need nevertheless.

A zero-sum economic environment has a lot of uncertainty in it.  You might use the words uncertainty and risk interchangeably but they are not the same.  Risk is something that is unknown but knowable.  If a deal forecast is at risk a sales representative — frequently at the urging of the sales manager — can ask more questions, get more data, and piece together an answer.  There are many issues in sales that are simply unknowable or mostly unknowable, for example, the details of the bid your competition makes.

When uncertainty — not just risk — enters the picture, our forecasting paradigm that relies on milestones in the sales process becomes useless.  We need better tools if we are to forecast in the face of uncertainty and those tools exist but few of us have taken them up yet.  For example, prudent managers might start with the territory planning process.  How much white space is in the territory?  What percentage of that white space is likely to churn this year?  What is the overall economic forecast?  Given our market share what is the probable share of that white space that we can capture?  Is that enough to sustain quota for one or more people?  How should we incentivize them?

Sales forecasting will always be an inexact science but we can do better than we are currently.  We could persist in basing our forecasting ideas on Say’s Law but inevitably it is a race to the bottom, to pure competition on price.  The airlines do that but none of them makes any money.

Oracle Fusion in (financial) Context

With the introduction of Fusion applications Oracle has joined the cloud community.  You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies.  That was one of Larry Ellison’s big points at the Churchill Club.  Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time.  For example, salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service and many other companies do too.

Because so many software company founders and executives got their starts at Oracle it was a natural for them to build on what they knew and they knew Oracle.  That may not sound like much if you stop thinking about it at the database but the community of Oracle people present and past gave many a start-up the intangible resources they needed to be successful.  Knowing who a product manager is or what is generally on a product roadmap can be useful information.  I am not saying that any legal lines are ever crossed but having been an insider and understanding the culture as well as the technology can be very helpful.

At any rate Oracle is, or will be with the full release of Fusion Applications, a member of the Cloud Club.  That leaves stragglers like SAP to still deal with the conversion and I have a notion that the pace will only accelerate from here and I expect that if cloud computing is not the dominant paradigm today it will be in the not too distant future.

Unlike salesforce.com and other companies that entered the market and developed their products as native SaaS applications, legacy companies had a great deal of work to do to convert to the new paradigm.  Changing a technology paradigm is never easy or cheap — the last time we did this we went form mainframes to client-server or was it client-server to thin clients?  But changing the technology paradigm is only half the battle.  The other, harder and more intense job is changing the business model.

Companies do not always have to change their business models when they change software paradigms.  As a matter of fact I am not sure if the majority of software companies today ever had to make a business model shift before the advent of cloud computing.  But there’s really no option at this point if a company wants to get to the cloud.

Oracle’s shift to Fusion, like many other vendors’ shifts to the cloud, buffers the business model change by effectively breaking the shift into two hard but more digestible bites.  Oracle is fortunate in that it has a large number of products and it is acquiring more all the time.  As a financial exercise, when Oracle begins selling fusion applications, at least a part of the revenue will come in the form of subscriptions and I expect that subscription revenue will grow at the expense of traditional licensing over time.

Because Oracle offers multiple products including hardware (Exadata storage systems — and servers if the Sun merger is approved) the company’s financial results will be insulated from a big hit — something that pure software companies dread when they change models, especially if they are publicly held.

So, I am not a financial analyst, but my reading of the situation is that Oracle has positioned itself and its business well with Fusion.  When delivered in a service mode, the applications will be competitive with other market leaders.  The applications ought to find a big market in other nations where software might be too expensive for local tastes.  And there at least multi-tenancy should prove to be essential.

Meanwhile, the conventional license business should continue as a viable option for customers who prefer that mode for as long as those customers want it.  Converting from the license paradigm to a more or less pure cloud paradigm will be a business decision and the required development will consist of rewriting contracts, building web sites and adjusting marketing.

This isn’t all guaranteed to happen but it looks like a promising and logical evolution.  Of course, I am reading “The Black Swan” right now and I am wondering about something highly improbable affecting this rosy scenario.

The Ellison Biography

The Oracle Sales Executive Summit 2009 that I attended during Open World attracted senior sales talent from major corporations and many of them spoke about their experiences and successes with Oracle CRM and SFA products.  All of the speakers’ biographies were printed in a handout and, since the session included a live feed from Larry Ellison’s keynote, his biography was also included.

It read in full:

Lawrence J. Ellison

Chief Executive Officer

Oracle Corporation

Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977.  He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.

‘nuff said.

Key Findings for OOW #3 — The Fusion Edition

Fusion is big, potentially powerful, based on new technology, backward compatible and not available yet.

Larry Ellison began taking the wraps off Fusion at his Open World keynote on Wednesday.  His appearance on Sunday with Sun CEO Scott McNealy was just for poking some fun at IBM, this was the real deal.  Fusion is a big idea and this post will leave something out – that’s a given – but here are some important impressions.

There are ten applications and I don’t write fast enough to have copied them all down from Larry’s slide.  For sure there was CRM but also GL, Deal Management, Territory and Talent Management too.

The applications are based on SOA architecture, the UIs have embedded BI.  There are six thousand database tables, 6,500 objects, 20,000 views, 10,000 task flows and the applications are code complete and being tested by customers.

Fusion is based on industry standards like JAVA Fusion middleware which Larry said is the first such deployment.

Fusion applications are scheduled to debut next year and while that is a little disappointing it is entirely in keeping with the purpose of a keynote – forward looking statements right?  Ok.

I saw some demos but as I said in a previous post, I want to see a birth certificate.

Fusion applications are modular and they are designed to be deployed as full replacements for other older Oracle products.  Modularity enables them to also work side by side with existing applications so that there is no need for a wholesale replacement.  There are also new applications that have no analogs with the older product suites so it is good that Fusion and legacy applications can work together.

Like a lot of CRM products coming out these days, the Fusion applications, based on a SOA architecture are intended to operate behind your firewall in a single tenant manner or at some other data center in either single or multi-tenant mode.  This approach neatly straddles the diverse deployment options that some people feel they need today and gives a company like Oracle the flexibility to support all of them with one code set.  This neatly solves the problem of how to convert Oracle’s product set from premise-bound to cloud resident by leaving the decision to the customer.  That’s good, fine even and it does a lot to close the discussion about on-premise vs. on-demand, or does it?

The trouble with running a private cloud is that as soon as I make a modification to the system I might be making the product unique and unsupportable putting me back into the same version conundrum that many hope to avoid.  I need to know more about this.

Interestingly, in no demo did anyone talk about Fusion code or coding beyond Larry’s statement about JAVA.  I suspect that is not because you can’t get into coding some arcane part of your application but I hope coding is infrequent and at a level of abstraction sufficiently removed from the guts of the operation to make it possible to have one version of code for the whole planet.

The Fusion applications, specifically the CRM stuff, are compatible with Oracle’s Social CRM gadgets and widgets and I expect that it will offer fairly robust support for enterprise computing when the applications hit the street.

The UI looks nice.  I don’t know what the technology is that supports it but it has an Adobe Flex look.  Nice job on that – it will give all those Gen Y people coming into sales and other front office disciplines a feeling that they are using something as modern as the games they play on the home computer.

That’s about all I feel qualified to say.  We need to see more but for now it is very good to see Oracle redeeming a promise it made a few years ago when it went on a buying spree in the front office market.