Enforcing analysts sign non-disclosures to view something they don't understand and then not report on what they see is a little confusing to me. Let's see what analysts that refer to BEA as a 'middleware' manufacturer were likely not to have seen, or if seen at least not understood.

In order to provide a migration platform Oracle will have to develop (should I say re-develop if they don't purchase BEA) transformation services for multiple versions of three large ERP platforms. Application level transformation of data may involve as many as 3x(number of versions of each ERP) X (up to a posssible 200x199x198x197x etc possible number of permutations) touch points. By involve I mean design, develop, test, and package these scripts or objects. The difficulty of course is one of significant complexity because Oracle ERP, PeopleSoft, and JDE evolved their internal workings over time and without a complete understanding of the outputs (workings) of the touchpoint internal processes, the interfaces will fail.

Migration is much simpler than 'integration'.

For integration the objects or scripts would be required to meet migration standards but would also have to contain embodied knowledge of the identity of the user and their role (RBAC) in an organization, the business processes, the message exchange method (remember the AS-400 and JDE and backward binary compatibility?), as well as targeted protocols for databases and reporting (future standards?).

Let's omit any consideration of how to deal with past client customizations and how they would be accommodated, protocols for SOA, and securing the Intranet EAI clouds required for the Fusion framework to operate safe from the incessant risk of multiple ports or multiple threads on a well publicized port being referenced before the client's competitor makes any important decision of their own. To not omit this from current Fusion planning and execution (imagining that I am there) would risk some kind of madness within the engineers faced with the prodigous task of bringing this new universe to material form.

Getting back to my original point only stated a different way...what would an analyst see of what Fusion is that they WOULD understand? Signing a non-disclosure only means that we will continue to hear BEA (and therefore Oracle Fusion) described as middle-ware by analysts being secretive.

It makes me cringe whenever I hear the word middle-ware attached to this couple, but then again I don't own Oracle or BEA stock. That would make me a not so good analyst.