With regard to your first point, I can understand the revenue recognition rules when they are reporting sales numbers, who is actually using the beta versions of the system, and install base of the new product. The post was more along the lines of Oracle’s promotion and discussion of what will be included and when the new Fusion apps will be available which is more of a “marketing” function than a revenue recognition “accounting” function. Because the Oracle salespeople did not want to have deep discussion about what was coming with the new Fusion apps to this prospect, it leads me to believe they are concerned about the danger of losing sales of current solutions because of marketing a future product.

To your second point, it sounds like Oracle will be rolling out pieces of Fusion to the current ERP products as well as offering a complete “Fusion” ERP solution. Our understanding is that they built Fusion from the ground up as a new product, and that they did not use PS, EBS, or JDE’s base code. This means that if a company were to completely install the new product, it would basically be an implementation of a new product. Oracle will mitigate this work by basing the software on a Service Oriented Architecture, provide a migration path, and use Fusion Middleware, but it is something to keep in mind.

Finally, thank you for the update that Larry Ellison may be announcing this new product in the fall. I had not seen an estimated date of release, so I wanted to be safe with a 1-2 year release time window. In general, software companies are notorious for pushing back release dates!

Secondly, regarding the upgrade to Fusion, all customers should be evaluating an upgrade to the latest version of their applications. Oracle are bringing a lot of the Fusion Applications concepts to the latest releases so there is often a lot of value to be gained there. Oracle has stated that there will be certain Fusion Applications that are replacement and certain that are new functionality. Where the app is a replacement, the customer will be able to upgrade as per the usual process. Where the app is new, this would require new licences.

General public concensus is that Larry will anounce and possibly release Fusion apps at this years OpenWorld conference in September. Having said this, Oracle is not expecting too many customers to upgrade initially and are chosing early adopters very carefully.