Oracle executives insist the company is about halfway to completing the suite even though it only announced it a year ago. In fact, Oracle is ahead of schedule, according to Phillips. "We've got the blueprint. We've got the data model...We'll just extend that with great functionality and strongly established middleware," said Phillips. "The hardest part—the requirements—have been done," said Phillips.

Phillips probably has one thing right - the requirements are the hardest part. That is why they are often the largest culprit in new product failure, because they fail to adequately express the customer's true needs, they frequently change, and they often do not match reality with what can actually be developed.

If we have learned anything over the years, it's that new software applications - especially innovative ones - rarely evolve effectively from blueprints. Secondly, is the recognition that requirements and design may be the halfway point in the number of words (e.g. requirements, design, code and test) however, they do not represent the halfway point in any traditional software development lifecycle. 25%? Maybe. 10% More likely.

Someone from Oracle might want to straighten me out on this, but it just doesn't appear to add up.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss how they are going to just pull functionality from their numerous currently released products and put them into Fusion - just a simple matter of putting the puzzle together. I'm not buying it.