Fusion Confusion? Oracle's Apps Program Leader Departs

The Oracle executive overseeing the company's application development projects, including its next-generation Fusion application set, is leaving the company at the end of the year. An analyst report says the departure of John Wookey, senior vice president of application development, "raises renewed concerns about the aggressive schedule for the release of the Fusion applications and suite."

Since Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards in 2005 and Siebel in 2006 Wookey has been the public face of the company's efforts to combine the best of those companies' applications with Oracle's own E-Business Suite applications to create the Fusion applications. Those applications are slated to begin hitting the market sometime next year.

Oracle issued no formal comment about Wookey's impending departure and information about why he's leaving and where he might be going was not available.

A source at Oracle, who confirmed Wookey's plans, said Thomas Kurian, a senior vice president who built Oracle's middleware business, will take over Wookey's job. Kurian will report to executive vice president Charles Rozwat who already oversees development of Oracle's middleware and database products. Senior vice president Steve Miranda, who has managed the Fusion development project on a day-to-day basis, will continue to do so and report to Kurian.

A report from Bernstein Research said Wookey's departure "raises renewed concerns" about whether Oracle can meet "the aggressive schedule for the release of the Fusion applications." It also said putting management of the Fusion apps under Kurian and Rozwat "reinforces our concerns that the suite may be a middleware-driven kluge rather than the promised fundamentally rewritten, unified code base and may, in fact, not be truly service-oriented."

The report also speculated that incorporating middleware products from BEA Systems, for which Oracle launched a $6.6 billion acquisition bid last week, could further muddy the picture.