Fred Pond, a past Quest president, also wants to see the IBM stack maintained. If Fusion is to be the best from PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Oracle, then Oracle has to give customers infrastructure choices, such as being able to use DB2 or Microsoft Corp. 's SQL Server databases, he said. The biggest fear is that as time goes on, Fusion looks less like a new product based on the best of Oracle's, PeopleSoft's and J.D. Edwards' ideas, technology and functionality and "instead looks more like an upgrade of the E-Business suite," said Pond, who is also the director of information services at Schnitzer Steel Industries Inc. in Portland, Ore. Schnitzer Steel is another J.D. Edwards /EnterpriseOne customer.

"We would like to see any applications in this area [Fusion] operate on the iSeries platform and with the DB2 database," said, Bubba Tyler, CIO at Conshohocken, Pa.-based Quaker Chemical Corp., an EnterpriseOne shop. "Otherwise, we will have to reinvest in infrastructure, training and support, and this added expense would bring no additional value to us."

Oracle declined to comment on the survey.