Over the past couple of years, Oracle has talked a great deal about the development of its cloud capabilities in enterprise applications.
Such capabilities range from customer relationship management to enterprise resource management and human capital management applications and beginning to extend into vertical industry solutions.
At a recent event outlining its latest cloud-based offerings, Maxine Holt, research analyst, Ovum believes Oracle made it “abundantly clear” that it has placed its bets on being “best of suite” in the cloud with its comprehensive series of solutions in this area.
“For many years there have been discussions aplenty about best-of-breed enterprise applications versus a suite approach,” Holt says.
“A best-of-breed approach gives an organisation access to leading-edge solutions, or solutions that address a specific business need, but the downside is the multitude of applications or services that an enterprise must manage if it has deployed a whole series of best-of-breed capabilities from different vendors.
“Following the suite route has long been thought to result in a set of nicely connected and integrated applications (in an ideal world) that may not, however, give an enterprise the leading-edge technology or full range of functionality that it is looking for.”
Holt believes today’s organisations are reconsidering their approach to enterprise applications in general and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite specifically.
“Skills and maintenance costs are making many of these legacy applications untenable, and software delivered via the cloud is an obvious answer to skills and maintenance issues while addressing legacy application modernisation,” she adds.
“Additionally, many enterprises are facing a myriad of cloud-based solutions, and the adoption of a more “simplified” suite approach is appealing on many levels, such as that of integration.”
Oracle is addressing this conundrum with its desire to be “best of suite”, claims Holt, giving enterprises what it believes are some great individual cloud-based application choices as they work through their legacy application modernisation challenges.
“Many of the acquisitions that Oracle has made over the years now appear to be working cohesively as a suite, with individual applications/suites available standalone as required,” Holt adds.
“By selecting one Oracle Cloud service, then another, then another, enterprises are being provided with solutions that have a consistent look and feel and user interface, while simultaneously addressing much of the back-end integration capabilities within the suite.”
Deployment of enterprise applications, irrespective of delivery method, requires business change, but given that Oracle ERP Cloud can now be deployed in a 16–24 week timeframe, Holt claims "technology has become less of a limiting factor."