ERP Software

Oracle Fusion upgrade path ,costs

Migration to Fusion may require multiple upgrades of each oracle fusion application package. For the majority of applications, Oracle will issue an upgrade to Fusion from only the two latest oracle versions If you’re using an older release, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the newer versions first.

Fusion is a complete rewrite. New product releases  have more problems than normal upgrades. It’s often better to upgrade after the software has been in the field long enough for the initial bugs to be identified by some other company.

There will be a shortage of Fusion specialist expertise after the initial product release. individuals with Fusion experience or even Fusion training will be in  demand and very expensive.

According to Ronald Schmelzer, analyst at  Zapthink (a SOA consultancy), SOA promises tremendous benefits for manufacturers because 70 to 80 percent of their IT costs are for just maintaining their systems. However, even if a manufacturer chooses not to go down the SOA route ,adopting SOA will not be optional because in the next few years, says Schmelzer, “the major ERP vendors, SAP and Oracle, are making their customers adopt their latest platforms … both of which are SOA to the core, and basically providing no other upgrade path.” These are indispensable ERP applications for any manufacturer.  he claims, “By 2010 80% of manufacturers will have adopted SOA because they had no other choice.”

Oracle Fusion resources

Oracle Fusion road map and transition costs

Oracle applications up 56%

Oracle shares  jumped after the ERP company said fourth- quarter profit and revenue beat its own forecast because of high sales.

The growth in new database licenses shows Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison's acquisition strategy is spurring customers to buy an array of programs. Redwood City, California- based Oracle has spent about $19 billion to buy 17 companies since January 2005, mostly for software to manage backoffice tasks.

New license sales of applications gained 83 percent, including the results from Retek  and Siebel Systems , bought in the past year. Excluding those, new application licenses gained 56 %  a sign that sales picked up for PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought for $10.6 billion in January 2005.

Companies are looking for stability and Oracle's results show big is better.

Oracle Middleware on course

Oracle has announced that 26,000 customers are now using Oracle middleware which will help the transition to Oracle Fusion. They have been hacking away since 2001 and claim to be the fastest growing middleware players.

Project Fusion is Oracle's plan to create an integrated suite of the best components of all the ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications it has acquired over the past year. These won't be just mixed and matched components cherry-picked from the PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards or Siebel Systems product lines. They will be replications of the best features and technologies from those products reproduced in entirely new applications developed in Java all will have lifetime warranties?

Oracle has certified these packages to work with Fusion Middleware

Oracle eBusiness Suite,

PeopleSoft

J.D. Edwards

Retek retail software

Oracle vs SAP |open source threat?

Oracle has just bought Sleepycat a supplier of open source database software for developers of embedded applications.

Larry Ellison quote is, "We are moving aggressively into open source. We are embracing it. We are not going to fight this trend. We think if we're clever, we can make it work to our advantage." Which if you compare against Peter Graf, SAP's executive vice president of marketing, "We believe that open-source business applications do not have enough time to mature before this huge consolidation wave matures,"

Oracle and SAP have very different views about the threat/opportunity that open source has within the ERP software market .For Oracle it could be a way to manage Open Source within ERP and trying to make sure the tiger does not bite you in the arse .SAP has a reputation of being a bit arrogant and they will tell you how to manage your business process the SAP way. I can see their point about Open Source being great for non critical business functions but there is one way to get a financial director to pucker up and that is to tell him that his core back office system does not have a strong reliable roadmap.

It will be interesting to see what impact open source has within the ERP software industry.

Oracle SOA Bundle

Oracle is releasing a bundled up set of SOA web services letting the tech boys sort out infrastructure for SOA projects.

This consists of

• BPEL Process Manager for web services orchestration.
• Business Rules Engine to design and manage business rules.
• Oracle Business Activity Monitor for real-time insight into operations.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager to deploy and managed applications.
• Oracle JDeveloper 10g IDE and connectors for peoplesoft,sap applications.

Oracle's cashflow has disappeared

Interesting article from the fool folks they have probed into Oracle's cash flow issues and what they have found is for your average investor the Oracle numbers do not add up because Larry is very trigger happy with his purchases .Add up three buyouts (Peoplesoft,Retek and Siebel )-- and these are not all the acquisitions that are taking place -- and you are talking about $15.8 billion. So, what is Oracle trying to do? Its mainstay database and middleware business was three-quarters of new software license revenue last quarter. It's a slow growth business, but very lucrative. Business software, which can also help sell database products, is growing faster and is lucrative, too.

Let's look at the cash
Bolstered by PeopleSoft, sales last quarter increased 19% over the year-ago quarter. But while the top line bloomed, the bottom line faded. Net income fell 2%.

The numbers were not pretty for free cash flow either. For the last six months, it's down 2%.

So, after spending $10.3 billion for an acquisition, net income and free cash flow are headed down. And, there is another multibillion-dollar purchase on the way.

Oracle is bulking up for its fight with SAP for ERP supremacy and is trying to keep Microsoft at bay in the lower end of the ERP market. When you consider that Oracle is trading for 22.5 times trailing annual earnings and is expected to grow earnings 11% a year for the next five years, there is hardly reason to expect it to outperform the market averages.

If you are still aching to buy Oracle,  It isn't pretty. It looks that way because over the last five years, Oracle has compounded earnings by a negative 1.3% (according to Yahoo! Finance). Guess what? Net income fell slightly more than that last quarter. This company is in a groove, and it isn't headed up.

Fool info

Oracle Fusion for SAP R/3 customers

Thirty days after Oracle introduced its Oracle Fusion for SAP (OFF SAP) programme, the number of SAP R/3 customers looking to make the switch to Oracle ERP applications is growing quickley. Faced with the issues of re-licensing and re-implementing their applications in order to upgrade from R/3 to mySAP ERP or mySAP Business Suite, more than 230 companies have registered in Oracle OFF SAP programme and expressed their interest in migrating from legacy SAP to Oracle applications.Expressing interest and actually making the change is the critical question here.

SAP customers show particular interest in leveraging the new Oracle programme to help save money, reduce complexity and improve the quality of business information by migrating to Oracle’s open, standards-based applications.

Oracle’s offer of up to a 100% license credit for SAP R/3 customers switching from SAP to Oracle applications is tempting many organisations, and the ease of migration is also a key concern for prospective customers.

Oracle Consulting has created an Insight for SAP migration programme to provide R/3 customers with a clear understanding of the migration process and its benefits, which include reduced upfront costs as a result of the two-year payment plan for the application license and support fees, with no interest and no payments for six months, followed by six instalments, available from Oracle Financing.

Oracle’s information architecture will also allow customers to run one global model and instance, freeing R/3 customers from the challenge of accessing and integrating fragmented data from legacy systems based in ABAP language.

I am sure that you can call SAP's bluff here on the upgrade and ask them what deal will they do for you to keep your business.