Fusion Tipster

Most of the early screenshots that came out about Fusion were all from the Web-based UI, things like the 9-box grid etc. Now that the product is out there we’re getting to see more. I attended an excellent webinar that explained a few things that were new to me:

1) The Professional User Interface is separate to the Casual User Interface

Oracle are terming the ‘Professional UI’ to be the one that we’ve seen most of so far, and the ‘Casual UI’ to be the one that was christened Fuse that we first saw at OpenWorld. I would expect that the former is targeted at administrative or power-users, whereas the latter is more geared towards Self Service applications. Here are a couple of shots of the Casual UI (click for bigger):

2) Outlook Integration

Oracle also showed the Fusion CRM Desktop within Outlook. This looked fully integrated (as many of the tasks could be carried out without leaving Outlook and accessing the Fusion UI). I’m not going to go into any detail on this as a) desktop integration is already a staple feature of most ERPs, and b) Desktop email clients like Outlook are losing popularity to web based email so this is less important than some of the other items.

3) Fusion Tap

We also saw some screenshots of Fusion TAP integrated with the Oracle Social Network (a professional Facebook, so to speak). Fusion Tap is going to be very useful to those with tablets, and with the continued progress of tablets in the workplace – and especially the growth of BYOD – this population is only going to grow.

One thing I particularly like about Fusion Tap is that it’s configurable, so you can adjust what the user sees and what they don’t. It’s not just a static native app.

4) Mobilytics

This is still in development, but it’s very aesthetically pleasing (as with the above pics, click for bigger):

5) Oracle Voice

The biggest surprise of all for me was the mention of Oracle Voice. It’s basically a Siri, but for Fusion. It’s being integrated with CRM first (and it’s not hard to see that this is where it’d be most useful).

So in summary, there are some really strong UI facets that are currently available, and there are some very exciting innovations that are in the pipeline.

(All of the above is covered by the standard Oracle Safe Harbour agreement, so don’t base anything contractual on what you see here. Some of the above is still in development too, so there’ll be improvements before it is ready.)

“The User Experience – by itself – is probably enough to sell this product.”

Spotted by Ultan.

All,

As part of my work at Succeed I’ve put together a short 2 minute video showing some of the Fusion highlights for our Simply Talent campaign.

For more info go to the Simply Talent website.

There was an interesting comment earlier today at Collaborate where a senior exec mentioned that of the 250 customers who’ve licensed Fusion already, most of them have opted for a cloud-based deployment. It’s encouraging that there is widespread adoption of the cloud, however you do wonder if some of these will move on-premise once things have settled down – as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters are intending to do.

I suspect that many of these early adopters are co-existing their Fusion modules with an existing core system, so SaaS hosting is understandable. When the time comes to replace the core system they may well move things back in-house.

It was also interesting to hear that Oracle expects to have made around 1,000 customer-driven enhancements by OpenWorld. That’s an incredible amount of improvements in such a short space of time.

See more here.

I was heartened to see an opinion piece on ZD Net discussing the Oracle’s recent Public Cloud / Fusion Apps progress. Oliver Marks – the author – clearly has access to much more than us outsiders, but the impression that he has formed – that Oracle has made huge progress since last year and is accelerating fast – is very encouraging.

He reports Steve Miranda (Senior VP for Oracle Fusion Development) as saying that he was confident that Fusion would prove to be the fastest ramp up in enterprise computing history in terms of uptake by customers, and looking at the momentum Oracle appear to have with their vast client base [he] looks to have a point.

Oliver also says “From the client enthusiasm and rapid uptake of Oracle’s Fusion offerings it would appear that the Oracle mothership is enjoying a pretty spectacular launch which should give enterprise competitors who have had plenty of room to maneuver in the cloud until now cause for concern. … It would appear that while the competition have been moving a lot of air talking about the future, Oracle have efficiently executed on their vision in remarkably short order and are accelerating pedal to the metal into a suddenly very mature cloud era.”

It’s a good article and well worth a read.

I’ve watched some Fusion presentations and webinars over the last month or two, and a couple of things have struck me.

1) This – if you just glance at it quickly – looks like it reads ‘Oracle confusion’

Not a good message to be sending out.

2) The Fusion Apps logo is really dull:

It’s just words.

Sure, some of the competition isn’t much better. The Workday one just seems a poor copy of the Amazon one. At least the arch in Amazon has meaning (i.e. going from A to Z)

I’m not sure what the arch in Workday signifies, is it sunrise or sunset? Or does the ‘O to A’ mean something that I haven’t cottoned on to yet?

At least it’s a friendly logo though.

It doesn’t need to say Oracle in it, we all know that Fusion is an Oracle product. Make it red if you want to keep the corporate branding involved. Just spend a few thousand letting your designers riff on the words ‘Fusion Apps’ (or maybe just Fusion) and see if they come up with something more likeable.

Oracle have uploaded an interesting little series of videos showing some of the personalities behind Fusion Apps development. It struck me as refreshing because Oracle is such a monolithic company, and although you often get to see/hear the execs speak you don’t often get to see the other contributors to the product.

For dedicated Fusion-watchers there’s probably not a lot of new information, but some of it is worth re-iterating:

Killian Evers – The set/family of Composers allows you to change the application without needing Java skills, and regardless of whether you’ve deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

Kristin Penaskovic – The Fusion help system is a cloud based portal called – imaginatively – the Fusion Help Portal. From the description it sounds a little like the hosted versions of PeopleBooks.

Janine Erb – The first time we had a mass group of people coming in and using the applications we heard people saying “I had to keep reminding myself this was Oracle because it’s so user-centric”.

Andre Ohl – Oracle are the only vendor that can offer an ERP where there’s flexibility over the deployment model. Fusion can be on-premise, SaaS/public cloud or hosted on a private cloud (on demand).

The camera work is a bit shaky, but it’s quite nicely done. At the moment they just have CRM and HCM ‘faces’, but it’s a good start.