Oracle’s Fusion Middleware platform appears to be gaining traction as a foundation for service-oriented architecture (SOA). According to Oracle, 68 independent software vendor (ISV) partners have migrated their solutions onto Oracle Fusion Middleware in the past financial year.

Mark Simpson, director of architecture at ISV Griffiths Waite, said that almost all of his firm’s customers are evaluating SOA based on Fusion, with many looking to upgrade from Oracle’s E-Business Suite. “Between 50 and 75 per cent are looking to make the move now, but everyone has a vision for SOA, which is a big change over the past six months,” he said. “We have already implemented four SOA projects and started consultancy with six more. It is a very small percentage who have evaluated and rejected the platform.”

It has been suggested that both Oracle and its ISV partners are using their combined muscle to push customers towards Fusion and new versions of other Oracle applications faster than many would like. Fusion is designed to knit together a range of software, including the JD Edwards and PeopleSoft enterprise application suites Oracle acquired in 2005.

But Simpson is adamant that firms are migrating only because they see the benefits of close integration to improve process efficiency, provide business intelligence and identity management, and make the best use of legacy applications based on non-Java code.

“The large application vendors are moving towards [SOA], so some feel they have to go to it whether they like it or not,” Simpson said. “But any resentment is going away now because companies are starting to see the benefits of moving to middleware. Oracle is not forcing it on customers – any of our clients on Oracle E-Business Suite can stay with that as long as they want.”

Bryan Vogus, worldwide JD Edwards specialist at Princeton Softech, a database archiving firm acquired by IBM earlier this year, said continuing pressure to upgrade is forcing some JD Edwards users to move to rival vendors’ software, especially SAP.

“There is a lot of pressure to do upgrades but they are not easy. Companies have to make so many modifications that they really have to make significant changes,” Vogus said. “It is an easy sell to some accounts, if they are upgrading from [JD Edwards] EnterpriseOne 8.0 or an older version. But in some cases, that pressure does cause resentment, which is why pockets of customers are moving on to something else.”

Even so, Vogus estimated that around 50 per cent of Princeton Softech’s customers running EnterpriseOne are currently upgrading to either version 8.10 or the Fusion-certified 8.12. “I have never seen JD Edwards customers embrace something so well. There has been a slight relief because of the way Oracle has supported it,” Vogus said..