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…
