SaaS Or is it?

Oracle have said that Fusion Apps will be available for deployment in a number of ways. One of these is SaaS. However, there is some dispute over what SaaS actually is. Oracle boss Larry Ellison appeared to suggest recently that multi-tenant SaaS as favoured by Workday, amongst others, was over hyped.

Some observers think that he doesn't care anyway since so much of the World's IT industry uses Oracle technology in one way or another - but wait. As far as I can tell so far, Workday doesn't. If that's true for any significant proportion of SaaS providers, if it catches on, it might give Oracle a thing or two to worry about.

I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs, but we are in interesting times in the software industry (well they are interesting to me, but maybe I'm just a sad geek).

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference - First Day

The keynote address from Marc Weintraub was well crafted and expertly delivered. Aside from his comment below, I didn't really learn a lot I didn't know already.

Marc said that Fusion Apps were entirely greenfield and didn't have any copy and paste code - I'd not heard that before.

I understood Oracle's strategy to try to align with what he called "inflection points" so that it can offer customers what they want when they want it - so, for example, they can offer multi-tenant SaaS delivery of Fusion if a customer wants that. I have zero idea of the architecture behind that - Oracle don't seem to be talking about that yet.

The HMRC session was also very interesting. RTI will ultimately use BACS as a delivery mechanism, but as I blogged previously, they have accepted that an interim solution using EDI will be needed. In my estimation almost every UK employer* will need to find time to install and test the EDI delivery from their provider, then do the same again when the BACS version is released. In addition, since many UKGP customers are working with a customised BACS routine (it's an SQR), they will need to revist that too.

*at least those who adminster their own payrolls.

Oracle has plans in place for development using pilot customers in line with HMRC. It was very encouraging to see HMRC spending so much time with us, and as I said to the HMRC folks, my personal view is in accordance with the other feedback they have had - RTI is a good idea, but as ever the devil will be in the detail.

All in all a very good day - there is more, but it will have to wait.

I know I should be up all night partying in the bar, but I have a presentation to do tomorrow and I'm not as young as I was.