Mr. Fusion leaving Oracle

Dennis Howlett is reporting on an internal Oracle email that confirms the rumor that Jesper Andersen, Oracle's SVP Application Development is leaving for Cisco.

This is a big deal in that, as Howlett points out, Andersen has always been considered the brains behind Oracle's Fusion program, its next-generation of products to take the best of the many products it has acquired.

In keeping with its recent practice of near-silence on Fusion, Oracle has not been forthcoming on Andersen's departure. Howlett interprets Oracle's silence and the loss of Andersen under three points:

• Fusion is happening but not at the pace Oracle originally thought.
• Coming as it does just before Oracle Open World, the story will be spun so that new releases will be branded as Fusion, regardless of whether they’re new or something else.
• Vertical market plays, on which Oracle was pinning a lot of hope are up in the air.

I had the pleasure of listening to Andersen speak once at a PeopleSoft conference several years ago and was happy to know that he was assigned leadership of the Fusion effort. His departure has to be a loss to Oracle. Hopefully they can backfill his role.

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