Kudos to Bill Kutik in his most recent column for (mostly) calling out what’s real about Oracle’s Fusion initiative – which is pretty much nothing, at least as far as HCM is concerned.
I’ve worked for software companies for nearly 25 years, and over the years I’ve built up some credibility and expertise when it comes to effectively communicating with people about a given set of strategies (some may call it “spin,” but I prefer “effective communication”). But one communication strategy I never (I repeat never) subscribed to is hard-core secrecy. What I know for certain about the ‘secrecy approach’ is this: you only keep things top secret when your messages will be received as controversial at least, or damaging, at worst. From my deliciously critical perch atop the HCM hill, I would offer some speculation as to why Oracle is being so secretive about Fusion:
- Oracle is suffering from a crisis of consensus internally, and no one can agree on what really should be done, resulting in the paralysis that could easily befall an organization made up of experts in HCM from three different and successful software companies. When Bill Kutik interviewed Oracle’s Gretchen Alarcon on his radio show (you can find the podcast here), she took the 5th on all of Bill’s softball questions about Fusion. Yawn.
- Oracle is months (if not years) behind schedule relative to the original Fusion communications. If you’ve religiously refused to talk about dates, you can always hedge your bets when you have delays. But there are a number of public statements that (at a minimum) led customers to believe that the first HCM products from Fusion would arrive in 2008. From everything observers can tell, this is not happening. Good news for guys like me!
- Oracle (like so many companies) is worried about the Sarbanes-Oxley patrol catching up with them. As a result, most companies tend to take extreme measures to avoid any implication of impropriety. I work for a publicly-traded software company, so I know the challenges Sarbanes-Oxley brings in terms of revenue recognition. In layman’s terms – if you talk too much about products that aren’t available, you have to ‘defer’ the revenue until the product is delivered, and it can have a near-term impact on reported revenues that Wall Street loves to hate. This is totally counterintuitive, but it could be a plausible explanation for why Oracle isn’t saying anything.
- Bill reported that Gartner said Oracle may be giving up on trying delivering that mother-of-all-migration-paths they’ve been touting for 3 years and are planning to focus on new customers as they launch Fusion for HCM. Knowing how complex the dynamics are in my customer base of 1,000-plus companies, this one seems feasible, if not likely. I wouldn’t want to be at the user group meeting where this one is announced!
So that’s my speculation on this. But realistically, Oracle doesn’t have to tell us anything – it’s a free world. And as far as I’m concerned, I hope they keep quiet. Their silence gives me time to mature our already-released products, develop deeper relationships with Oracle clients and reap the spoils when those Fusion upgrade projects are so expensive that VPs of HR run screaming for cover at the thought of a meeting with the CEO (or worse, board of directors) to ask for the big dollars that will inevitably needed to make Fusion work.
Silence can, as we all know, be golden.
