So my writing of this particular post could have been more timely. Oracle OpenWorld took place in October. And here I am, writing about it in the 2nd week of November. What a slacker!
Truth be told, I’ve been pondering…what was the single most important news from OOW? And I’ve come to a conclusion. Although there was a plethora of significant developments – Exalytics, Pre-Release of EBS 12.2, the continued evolution of APEX, the General Availability announcement of Fusion Applications, the Oracle Public Clound, Big Data – none of those, in and of themselves, was the single most important piece of news in my opinion.
The news that grabbed my attention and continues to grab my attention: the inclusion of Fusion Applications CRM and HCM in the Oracle Public Cloud. Let me explain…
Take a look at the latest Fusion Applications installation guide here. You should figure out fairly quickly that running Fusion Applications on-premise requires substantial hardware, memory and network infrastructure. Some larger enterprises will take this route for various business reasons: large research & development companies, organizations with national and international security concerns, government agencies all come immediately to mind, Fortune 2000 companies with heavy transactional volumes. But for the typical organization in the SME space, the infrastructure investment required may not be feasible.
But now we’ve got Fusion Applications being offered through the Oracle Public Cloud as a service…yup, a SaaS offering (for those of you who dig trendy acronyms). That’s likely a relatively inexpensive point of entry for the SMEs interested in Fusion Applications…especially for those interested in a co-existence strategy with existing applications.
Oracle getting seriously into the SaaS game? Providing an attractive point of entry to Fusion Applications for SMEs? Saving customers from the maintenance headaches of a substantial ERP environment? Yeah, if all this comes to fruition, it’s the biggest news out of OOW.
Comments and differing opinions are always welcome in the comments…
5 comments:
Rhetorical questions ...
Is this of any short term interest to the existing client base (eBus, PSoft,JDE), or will they/should they just wait and see ?
Will the initial Fusion Apps functionality be compelling enough for SMEs, in the absence of any indication of the future breadth of Fusion Apps SaaS.
Will there be two divergent paths (Fusion Apps Lite for SaaS v Fusion Apps as a self managed ERP) or will they in fact converge ?
Oracle could become a player in SME, but only in the unlikely event that they put a competitive price tag on this thing
@Mark: My impression is that Oracle is developing apps concepts in Fusion Apps, then spreading those concepts to the Apps Unlimited product line. So I think the existing client base can see their future direction from Fusion Apps directions. About the other two questions...your guess is as good as mine.
@Sten: Pricing is always the issue, isn't it?
As one of my teammates recently lamented, the basic requirements for Fusion Apps almost make life a little tough on us would-be-tinkerers: Harder to build a sandbox on ones laptop with all those components. :)
That aside, I wonder what this tacit big-iron requirement does to the "run new and old ERP 'side-by-side'" marketing approach. If you're an SME and your Applications Unlimited installation is in your datacenter, what the the appeal of tying that to a cloud-based service? Is the operational complexity of establishing and maintaining that integration going to retard adoption? Perhaps for some it's an opportunity to consider migrating Apps Unlimited to the cloud as well, but that comes with its own sticker shock, and is not a clear win even if you get rid of a few pesky high-overhead DBAs. ;-)
Seems like there's some work to be done before Fusion Apps is a legit SME play, hosted services notwithstanding.
can these apps customized
can customization be done thru browser based tools or ADF know how is needed for that
Post a Comment