Oracle seems to be planning a bold move to win the hearts and minds of PeopleSoft customers. Rather than taking the more typical path in the software industry to simply support existing customers for a period of time or to provide customers with migration paths, as written up at the IT Jungle,

With Project Fusion, Oracle intends to provide Oracle Applications customers, as well as PeopleSoft Enterprise, EnterpriseOne, and World customers, with a new ERP suite that is developed in Java on the back-end and HTML and Dynamic HTML (DHTML) on the front-end. This Project Fusion suite will take the expertise of all of the three core ERP suites now controlled by Oracle (including lots of depth in different industry sectors) and make a single, united ERP suite that all customers can upgrade to, not migrate to. So mark these words, PeopleSoft people: "It should be a normal upgrade process," said Ellison. "An automated upgrade, not a conversion." This is a tall order, particularly for the four different application suites Oracle wants to upgrade to.

The first pieces of Project Fusion should begin appearing in 2006, along with new technologies called data hubs and transaction bases. Then, in 2007, initial Fusion modules will begin appearing, and in 2008 the full Fusion ERP suite, and the successor to the four current ERP suites controlled by Oracle, is expected to be ready to attack that base of 23,000 customers. At least, that is Oracle's plan.

Steve Shu