Oracle Cloud Computing - Hitting a Cloud Home Run

As cloud computing goes mainstream, the companies that offer software as a service or SaaS; platform as a service, or PaaS; and similar solutions will lead the way. According to Gartner, that's exactly what Oracle is doing. With a full complement of cloud services and solutions, all emphasizing the value of SaaS and similar revenue-generating products, Oracle and IBM are ready to duke it out for No. 2

Should your organisation adopt the Oracle Cloud Computing strategy (known as Oracle on Demand in the e-business community) and move away from locally hosted applications and database solutions?

For existing and especially larger organisations making the journey to Oracle on Demand will be expensive in terms of committing budget and internal IT resources to making the transition to Oracle on Demand. The journey will obviously delay any business projects that would have been managed in the transition time window.

So what compelling events will encourage or force organisations to transition to Oracle on Demand?

·         Upgrade  to R12 and eliminate a significant a number of R11 customisations and avoid the temptation of your organisations to add new customisations

·         Migrate to Fusion – some existing R12 customers (locally hosted) are already using Fusion applications via cloud computing. A number of Peoplesoft HRMS applications are being used by Oracle e-business users ( who have implemented HRMS)

·         Reduce the risks and retention issues around internal Oracle professionals and dependency upon long term contractors

·         Reduce the operational risks and costs of managing data-centres. I came across one Local Council last year who could not afford a disaster recovery solution!

·         Adopt a new IT Strategy - Allow Oracle to manage the Oracle Technology Stack and perform the quarterly patching of the database ( and perhaps even the application)

·         Form a Shared Service Centre with one or more partners and select Oracle to run the IT functions thus allowing the SSC to focus on delivering services to clients.

·         The Organisation is a new Oracle customer – a significant number of new customers (typically small or medium size firms) are adopting Oracle on Demand. Recent implementations I have been involved with include Masternaut and Abtran who also adopted Oracle Accelerators to fast track their implementations and adopt ERP best practice

Can the benefits be realised – what are the potential blockers?

·         Management and IT inertia – keeping IT in-house

·         Organisations retain significant customisations and interfaces making the Oracle Cloud solution potentially more expensive when performing upgrades in the future. Oracle on Demand offers a far more flexible approach these days to managing client environments in the cloud and also those all-important customisations which organisations will continue to develop and upgrade

·         ERP projects continue to focus on ‘installing’ IT at the expense of ‘implementing’ business solutions. Organisations need to invest time and resources into adopting a business change methodology. I have used Changefirst on a several occasions to empower the business community to impact the key ERP process and support the journey to full adoption.

In theory Oracle on Demand should make implementing the IT part of the project easy allowing the project to focus on key workstream like process management, data migration, user testing etc

Adopting Cloud Computing will allow Organisations the opportunity and platform to implement new applications from Oracle and many now are badged under Fusion plus also BI tools and solutions.