Oracle, the huge database and application company, went on a spending spree and bought JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Retek and Siebel, all large application vendors. Oracle will eventually bring them all together in an effort labeled 'Project Fusion'. The customer base, the trade press and especially the competitors have made a lot of hay over the project. It's a huge challenge and if Oracle pulls it off there will be a lot of very smart and very surprised people around. Why would Oracle bother to bring several different applications together? Because it makes perfect economic sense. With one application set they can serve the customer base of the 5 companies, if you also count Oracle's application base, with a single support group, a single application platform and a single code set. The fusion project will pay for itself pretty quickly. Microsoft likewise went on a spending spree to purchase Axapta, Navision, Great Plains and Solomon. They also have their own CRM product and several other business oriented products in the pipeline. The customer base, the trade press and the competitors have been largely silent. Wonder why that is? Why such different treatment for Microsoft in what amounts to the same scenario as Oracle? Well for one thing Oracle, like its Chairman Larry Ellison, has been upfront about its plans. There is no quibbling about it, no shading the grey areas. Larry says Oracle is going to do XYZ and that's it. Microsoft on the other hand has really not laid out a long term strategy that I can find. They have said that they will rewrite the applications in C++ and Visual Basic but after that it is anyone's guess what will happen. The other big reason for the relative quiet around Microsoft's strategy is that the customers are smaller. The trade press can make a splash with a quote from a Fortune 500 customer of Oracle but the customers of the Microsoft product mix are neither as vocal nor as well known. So that have not garnered much attention. My guess is that Microsoft will be forced to eventually roll all of the products together. They will end up with one business solution for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There is just no other economic model that makes sense, especially in the SME space where both the top line and the bottom line of new deals is much smaller. Why would they want to continue to support 4 different code sets for Account Payable? It just doesn't add up. And add to this the announcement that somehow some or all of these products are going to be reconfigured for and on-demand software as a service offering and you have a cauldron of confusion. And will Microsoft continue to offer a CRM product that's not integrated with any of the Acocunting/Inventory packages? There's a lot of work to be done in the Microsoft product mix before it starts to make sense. A good place to start is the a clear and forthright message from the corner office on what is to become of all these packages, platforms and product support networks. On my way to a NetSuite implementation today I heard a radio advertisement for Dynamics. Sure, change is good, when you know what it is and where you expect it to take you. But change in the dark? That's not dynamic, that's crazy. Update: So apparently Microsoft understands the difficult course they must now navigate. This article by Phil Wainewright get to the heart of the matter here. | 
