Recently, I borrowed a friend’s car — a newer version of my own — and found that I loved the new model. It was more agile and had added several features I liked. I had no idea what I had been missing. It took some getting used to but proved to be a major improvement in the driving experience.
By itself, a late-model car isn’t all that important, but imagine an entire business where users find their workday upended by a new application layout. After a bit of a learning curve, productivity is gained, business focus is streamlined, and if the application is critical, this may lead to numerous uncalculated business improvements.
Enterprise applications are meant to run with ease, efficiency, and power. We’re so used to functioning with complication and restriction that we don’t think to ask — or even wonder — whether industry-leading solutions and expert strategic control might easily raise our enterprise-app game. We look at options like cloud platforms, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or enterprise solutions like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).
Yet, when I imagine all the issues than can come up during a applications expertise, the considerations, both hidden and out in the open, are staggering. If you’re updating a mobile app for a network of users, a procurement solution for a single department, or an asset management process for an entire enterprise, expertise becomes a critical need.
Do you have the best engine and the right roadmap for your enterprise apps? What versions are you running? Is it time for an update, or upgrade, a test, a migration? Are application discrepancies causing problems, or creating risk? Will support and patching be covered ongoing if you’re on an annual as opposed to a long-term release Oracle database license? Can you get an extension? Let us help you find your way.
Oracle designed Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) precisely to run enterprise business applications in a manner that permits you to manage your business like a concept car. EBS allows for full critical app functionality — CRM, ERP, HCM, and SCM — together in a unified suite.
But you’d never put such a futuristic car on a restricted roadway riddled with potholes and congestion. Why place your enterprise apps — mission-critical software and data — on inferior, siloed sets of disparate on-premise infrastructure, or, equally unfair, on a risk-ridden, badly networked, third-party cloud?
In many cases, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure are like the autobahn to the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) machine. They both deliver the optimized roadway EBS needs and can scale to allow you to conduct business at an enterprise level, at lower costs. Application migration to OCI, Azure, or any other platform requires a great deal of expertise.
Our webinar, “Shore Up Your Enterprise Apps Strategy,” is about the critical knowledge that goes into a cloud migration project. In this webinar, Biju Thomas, Senior Director of Data Intensity’s Global Oracle Practice, tells you about the different kinds of solutions for upgrading your critical ERP application on-premise or taking it to a multi-cloud platform.
In several scenarios, the need for an expert partner is clarified. Biju covers the latest version of Oracle’s EBS (12.2.9) and the evolution of the supported database versions. He then discusses the advantages and tactics for several options such as: 1) Do nothing, 2) upgrade your on-premise database, 3) upgrade and migrate to cloud, or 4) an SaaS solution using Oracle or other clouds.
Doing nothing is always cheapest in the short term, like sticking with a bike instead of using a car to get around. But this can only get more costly as time goes by, with limited capacity, upgrades becoming more involved, security becoming precarious, and losing opportunities to keep up competitively.
The EBS upgrade requires more work at the outset, because you need to understand the new capabilities of your new application version. The importance of working with a strategic partner becomes clear, as the best way to ensure a smooth transition involves a knowledgeable Oracle service provider.
The steps to a technical upgrade entail understanding your plan for technical and functional impact, preparing customizations, patches, integrations, system architecture, testing, and finally deployment. Biju takes you into the details of each step, showing you how to make your system upgrade seamless, reducing downtime, ideally, to near zero. Business interruptions can be costly in the immediate term, and mistakes made during the launch of a new version of E-Business Suite (EBS) can prove expensive in unanticipated ways beyond the horizon. The goal is to do it right the first time.
Moving to the cloud can be done in two ways: You can migrate your database to the latest supported version first and leave your EBS version upgrade for a later time. This can assist peace of mind and also keep users satisfied as their expectations for the software are stabilized.
The other option is a true ““move and improve”” of the infrastructure and the process for your EBS, which is preferable when you’d like to get your migration and upgrade done more quickly, for a more impactful outcome, and also do not have to impact a large population of users through multiple testing and validation phases.
The questions you might ask about migrating to the cloud include the number of clouds you might consider, the best cloud for your Oracle EBS workload, the license implications, security, and a lot more questions that you might not think about – another advantage of working with an Oracle services experienced partner.
Depending on where you already have your workloads, EBS, and non-EBS instances, you may want AWS or Azure Cloud instead of OCI. You may even discover that a hybrid-cloud approach — for example, EBS application servers on Azure and database on OCI — is the best strategy.
You may have business requirements that rely on multiple cloud platforms, ranging from Oracle to Azure to Amazon Web Services to a private cloud to some combination of cloud platforms. An experienced Oracle managed services provider like Data Intensity can bring the tools and options to design the right multi-cloud solution for your exact configuration.
Today, more than ever, successful business operations demand extreme agility. And extreme agility demands Data Intensity.
Where do you want your business to go? Let us help you tune that engine to roar and give you a road map to get there. Watch this detailed webinar to understand best-practice enterprise-application modernization requirements and learn about release and support road maps to ensure you’ve designed an enterprise business application strategy optimized for business growth, vulnerability protection, cloud migration, and data life cycle management. Request your Oracle TCO Transformation Assessment today.
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