John Wookey "exchanged" Oracle for SAP?

On some, data unconfirmed so far, John Wookey who was earlier holding a post of the vice president for development of business applications in Oracle corporation [1] (file) is ready to accept the offer on work from SAP company [2] (file) in the nearest future. Representatives both SAP, and Oracle refused to comment on this news so far.

John Wookey was one of key figures in Oracle corporation. He came there in 1995 from Ross Systems company, also the developer of the known business applications (in 2003 Ross Systems was purchased by CDC Software corporation). In 2005 John Wookey headed one of the most significant projects of Oracle – the Fusion project which consisted in the translation of all business applications of Oracle and also the JD Edwards, Siebel and PeopleSoft software products purchased by it, on a single platform. According to the last data, the first users will have to get access to applications of Fusion until the end of 2009 within beta testing.

In October, 2007 John Wookey left  Oracle that generated many doubts in a successful completion of this project. The reasons of its leaving corporation did not reveal. Reportedly, after its leaving project management of Fusion was entrusted to Chuck Rozwat.

It is obvious that working in SAP, John Wookey will be able to introduce all the experience accumulated by it in Oracle and in Ross Systems there. According to some analysts, perhaps with its participation SAP will try to build own analog of the strategy of Oracle Applications Unlimited developed since 2006.

Let's remind that earlier in Oracle were going to keep independent development of applications of the PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel families to a release of the first version of Fusion Applications on which users of these systems had to migrate. However later, being afraid of mass migration of clients not on Fusion Applications, and on solutions of other vendors, including SAP, Oracle was forced to promise continuation of support and development of several independent lines of software.

So far it is unclear, such position will be how important for SAP which general business strategy consists, unlike Oracle, not in acquisition of ready-made solutions, and in creation of own. The niche solutions purchased by SAP are bought by it for the purpose of embedding in own lines of software, and about continuation of their independent development, usually, is not talked. As for acquisition of BusinessObjects, SAP already expressed the intention to stop further development of own practices and to switch completely to promotion of the new BI platform.

Let's remind that in September, 2008 Oracle was left by one more top manager - Jesper Andersen, the senior vice president for application development. He was responsible for development of all line of business applications, including development of new integration architecture of Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and creation of industry solutions. The Cisco company became its new work location.