Organizations should be able to choose how to add value and retain flexibility in adopting their business applications
By Natasak Rodjanapiches, Managing Director of Oracle Thailand and Head, Applications Partner Development - ASEAN
The next generation of business applications promise key benefits like a complete service-oriented architecture and embedded business intelligence. But the road to adoption needn’t be the conventional ‘rip and replace’ thinking that makes organization nervous. Natasak Rodjanapiches, Managing Director of Oracle Thailand and Head, Applications Partner Development - ASEAN, ORACLE advocates that enterprises should be empowered to continue leverage their existing investments in business applications, while adopting a modular approach to inject modernity, flexibility and greater value. The right enterprise IT architecture and IT partner is critical.
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As economies recover from the downturn, businesses in Thailand are looking towards leveraging IT to support and drive their next level of growth and development. However, growing businesses face challenges as they attempt to capture the next wave of development using old infrastructure.
A number of CxO customers have confided in us when they decided to stay back on prior business computing platforms, it became significantly more costly over time for their organizations to support those products, to integrate them with other systems, to patch them, to upgrade them, to configure them, to add additional business applications or modules or have them run efficiently alongside of those older platforms.
The next generation of business applications promises benefits like a complete service-oriented architecture, revolutionary user interface with collaboration capabilities, and native, embedded business intelligence capabilities. Enterprises may face a crossroads in terms of having to grapple about discard existing business applications in favour of these new next-generation applications. But a ‘rip and replace’ decision is highly expensive and generally carries much higher risks than staying with the existing platforms. Some businesses may not even have the option of ripping and replacing due to constraints in policy or the nature of their business.
Choice without Ripping and Replacing
The fact is, our customers business computing systems cannot stay static if they want to remain competitive. They want to get business value without being compelled to undergo significant difficulties replacing their ERP or CRM systems. They want as seamless and as smooth an integration as possible to generate business value, and be able to consume new capabilities over time, and add value in their business in whatever stages or proportions they wish, when they wish.
At Oracle, we recently provided the first glimpse of Oracle Fusion Applications, the next generation of business applications that we think sets the standard for application architecture, design and deployment. Oracle designed them so that our customers will not have to face this rip-and-replace crossroads. Oracle developed these next-generation business applications on a Services-Oriented Architecture, enabling them to be deployed in modular ways as customers choose.
This means that these new business applications can co-exist in customers’ environments in a seamless manner. So, whether they want to continue to run their entire ERP and CRM footprint on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid mode, they will have choices.
Oracle is very focused on making sure that our customers are able to keep their ‘centre of gravity’ and continue on their IT investment and adoption path at their own pace. This is fundamentally important, especially if their business applications provider has continually invested to develop and support their applications products and solutions and help customers support their growing needs. For example, Oracle has been walking the talk here with investments in its PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Siebel and other product families with new releases over the last five years since acquiring them (not to mention Oracle E-Business Suite as well).
Our commitment to customers remain clear: we will continue to deliver on new releases, enhance existing applications and bring these products forward. We still have dedicated teams doing these and we will continue to invest to protect our customers’ investments. Oracle Fusion Applications build upon the commitments Oracle has made in its Applications Unlimited strategy, and Oracle will adhere to its lifetime support policy that helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs.
Co-existence of old and new applications
One of our customers in the manufacturing sector, Eaton Corporation, a diversified power management company with businesses in electrical components and systems for power quality as well as aerospace fuel, hydraulics and pneumatic systems for commercial and military use, among others, had acquired a lot of companies, they have a lot of disparate manufacturing systems, some of which were very old ERP systems. They had a need to centralize their overall order orchestration process.
Instead of ripping out all their old ERP systems, they decided that a couple of divisions start off first with a centralized order hub and plug that into their existing variety of fulfilment systems. They were able to do so using a product called Distributed Order Orchestration. Through this co-existence exercise, they have made address a business challenge safely and gain value as they are now able to decrease lead times and manage their processes seamlessly across the organization.
Adopt standards
It makes sense for customer to have standards-based platforms help to simplify the many moving parts in the IT environment. We advise our customers to adopt some of Oracle’s middleware technology where it makes sense. In that way, if they want to deploy solutions such as Identity Management, or the Oracle SOA Suite for integration, they can do so easily.
Businesses want help in managing their IT infrastructure and lines of businesses, in enabling the smooth co-existence of the various parts of their IT stack while preserving their choice in terms of what solutions to adopt, and when and how to adopt them.
They are looking for IT partners who can offer a range of integrated on-demand and on-premise solutions that will help support, drive and extend their business. Oracle has the capability as the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company, to offer these in the context of software and hardware that is engineered to work together.
To sum up, businesses should not have to rip and replace in order to gain flexibility and modernity in their existing IT environments. If they already have invested in standards-based platforms and robust business applications that have demonstrated clear commitments to continued development and support, we advocate that they maintain their center of gravity with their existing applications.
Have your cake and eat it
What customers can do to prepare themselves for the next generation of business applications is to upgrade to the latest release of their business applications. As they customers stay current on new software releases, they gain from an efficiency, cost, productivity, and usability perspective. We also recommend that they continue to adopt technology standards and looking to extend with suitable co-existence opportunities where they can add value around the edges of their business application infrastructure.
With an open, integrated and standards-based platform, customers can also uptake new technologies and applications to drive greater business agility and innovation more easily.
By having choices, customers get the best value and the best return on their investment. This focus on ‘co-existence’ is critical: customers can take advantage of applications – whether Oracle Fusion Applications or any others - to address particular business pain points without disrupting their core infrastructure through migrations or platform changes, in a co-existent fashion, through tighter integration.
