Sheila Jenkins Oracle News Headlines

John Wookey Out at Oracle

A recent article published on Eweek.com confirms recent rumors of Oracle’s plans of replacing the leadership of its application development for Fusion Applications, John Wookey. Wookey will be replaced by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president responsible for Oracle's Fusion Middleware.  Fusion Middleware is the underlying platform for Fusion Applications.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2198902,00.asp  

Oracle will possibly announce the status of the Fusion plan at its annual OracleWorld conference in November; Fusion suite is expected to hit the streets in 2008. However, the executive shuffling of the deck around Fusion leads to some big questions around Oracle's Fusion Applications plans, including whether Fusion Applications will be delayed beyond 2008, and whether Oracle is experiencing development problems in trying to bring together "the best of" functionality from at least four major suites of applications: Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel Systems.  

When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2005, it announced Fusion Applications would be ready sometime in 2008. In January 2006, Oracle officials held a press conference to report that Wookey's teams were "halfway there" with Fusion Applications development.

When asked to comment on the rumors that Wookey was indeed leaving Oracle, Enterprise Applications Consulting principal Joshua Greenbaum (and Enterprise Irregulars blogger) said, "if I was Oracle and I thought things were in trouble regarding a 2008 release of Fusion, I wouldn't throw in the towel now and act as if it couldn't happen. I would be throwing resources and people at it," said Greenbaum. "It's a little premature to throw in the towel" on Fusion Applications.