INTRODUCTION TO ORACLE FUSION CLOUD SERVICES

By going through this small write up, readers will understand about Oracle Fusion cloud and what are different challenges for oracle to implement the same in future. Also we will briefly understand oracle’s future strategy for Cloud services.

Over the past several years, there been a lot of talk regarding Oracle Fusion and many people struggle to understand what exactly this means. Fusion refers to Oracle’s Cloud infrastructure (Fusion Middleware) and the development of new applications specifically designed for the Cloud and subscription services. More recently, Oracle has focused communications on the business process value and business use of these applications and now refers to these applications and underlying technology simply as “Cloud”.

What are challenges for Oracle?

According to recent survey by Forrester Oracle has underperformed with its Oracle Fusion Applications. As customers are refusing to switch to the more expensive Fusion apps and Oracle customers are making it difficult for the company to grow application revenue.

As of now, 65% had no plans to move to Fusion Applications and another 24% were on the fence. The biggest barriers were Oracle’s muddled application strategy and the immaturity of Fusion, which became available in November 2011. Oracle has experienced low level of user adoption of its Fusion Applications, the next-generation enterprise application suite.

Recent acquisitions of software-as-a-service companies, such as Taleo and RightNow Technologies, are not bringing in enough revenue and customers showed little interest in trying the SaaS products, with only 11% of survey respondents interested in making the move. Oracle is in danger of losing business from some of its customers. Forrester found 29% of the companies it polled were planning to move to another vendor’s SaaS product or packaged application. The main reasons for their unhappiness with Oracle were high licensing costs, high maintenance costs and difficulty in upgrading.

What is Future Plan?

Oracle has invested heavily (both in terms of money and resource) in Fusion middleware and applications and this is one of the biggest areas of growth for the company and will not allow their customers to ignore them. At the same time Oracle will not allow Applications Unlimited customers to stay where they are forever.

Oracle will focus more on customers to move to Fusion or its cloud infrastructure products in near future. Soon or later customers will start feeling pressure from Oracle that stay with the older technology.

Fusion Applications are their main strategy for growing software revenue and defending against a number of fast-growing SaaS competitors. Oracle’s cloud offering of HCM [human capital management], CRM [customer relationship management] and ERP [enterprise resource planning] applications is the strongest and most complete in the industry.

Deploying Oracle Application on the Cloud

Cloud infrastructure is appealing to almost all IT organizations as these are scalable, reliable, secure and cost-effective. Oracle is not recommending customers to shift their Production environments to the Cloud right away, to make this process easier, Oracle has even published machine images of E-Business Suite 12.2.5, JD Edwards Enterprise One 9.2, and PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace to create instances of these applications on the Oracle Cloud.

Customers will save lots of time by deploying an image from the Marketplace instead of the usual process of downloading and staging software, installing and configuring, etc. Once you have deployed the software in the cloud, you can use environments to create setups, test new functionality, implement business flows and conduct POCs or CRPs. For existing Apps Unlimited customer, they can also migrate Dev or Test environments to Oracle Cloud.

Under Oracle Applications Unlimited, Oracle continuously innovates the current applications and will also delivered the next generation of Cloud applications.

Oracle Cloud is the most integrated public cloud and offers best-in-class services across software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Oracle Cloud helps organizations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity.

Conclusion

Broadly, Oracle Fusion applications were divided into four software categories-

1 Customer relationship management

2. Human capital management

3. Enterprise resource planning

4. Supply chain management.

Current Cloud Applications suite includes CRM; Financials; Governance, Risk, and Compliance; HCM; Procurement; Project Portfolio Management; and SCM and within each of these groups, there are sub-categories that provide companies multiple layers of services and modules.

These applications are being delivered through the Oracle Cloud in addition to on-premises setups. The Cloud application suite had rapidly gained momentum and there was new functionality being added regularly – with major releases up to three times per year.