Oracle ERP to the Cloud: Why and How to get there?

Written by Yvan Cognasse 
Pressures to rapidly innovate, cut costs and stay current with clients and employees continue to drive in 2015 customers to adopt Cloud technologies that enable business agility.

Besides moving Customer Experience (CX) and Employees (HCM) applications to the cloud, organizations are also discovering that by using the cloud for their back-office systems, they can gain even greater freedom.

A common system most in need of agility is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which runs key business management functions, ranging from Financials and Project Portfolio Management to Procurement and Financials Reporting. 

Add the growing adoption of technologies such as social, mobility and big data analytics, and an enterprise’s need for agile ERP will gain even greater importance, which is why some pace-setting organizations have already moved their ERP systems to the Oracle cloud, or extended their Oracle or non-Oracle (inc. SAP) back-office systems with Oracle ERP cloud capabilities. 

Multiple Benefits for ERP Customers to move to or extend with Oracle ERP Cloud

While agility remains a key motivator in moving to or extending with ERP Cloud, the cost of maintaining older hardware or purchasing new hardware compared to using cloud-based infrastructure has also been a traditional key driver, as the move enables enterprises to switch from a significant capital expense to a less expensive, variable operating expense.

I list below other good reasons for a ERP on-premise customer to move to ERP Cloud or extend existing ERP on-premise solutions with ERP Cloud:

• Take advantage of new and improved ERP features as soon as they are available;
• Plan now to address any ongoing ERP support considerations and regulatory compliance requirements;
• Migrating ERP to the cloud allows parallel migration and testing. Therefore no extra hardware purchases for the testing and upgrade. Business disruption is minimized. And, by moving to the cloud, this provides for smoother future upgrades that are based on your own timeline;
• ERP systems have been always very expensive to maintain. Organizations can now reduce expenses by adopting cloud-based infrastructure and services, and redirecting in-house IT staff from ERP-based infrastructure maintenance. By tapping the deep resources cloud-based ERP services and the systems management services, enterprises can rely on having consistently stable operations, regardless of whether they continuously ramp resources up or down;
• As infrastructure becomes more of a commodity, I think the differentiator for the ERP Cloud customers will become more a more the Platform-As-a-Service (PaaS) they will use and how well they will program their applications to take even better advantage of the cloud’s agility.

As more organizations investigate transition to or extension with cloud-based ERP, Oracle Cloud Architects team already has its eyes on the future. With a long legacy in Oracle Applications, Middleware and System architecture, we are now exploring how organizations can restack their architecture and applications to gain even greater efficiencies.

Organizations are already thinking to move or extend with ERP Cloud solutions 

Moving to the latest release of an ERP suite on-premise has been always perceived as a daunting and risky initiative. Business disruption, downtime, limited staff, and maintaining customisations top the list of concerns when upgrading. Furthermore, with Cloud, the challenges of data security, business profit, Internet accessibility, and the total cost become initial issues for businesses to choose a fit one.

Despite these typical ERP and Cloud challenges, a new cadre of Oracle accelerated methodologies like True-Cloud Methodology (TCM) and migration technologies exist for onboarding and having organisations benefit from the competitive ERP Cloud pricing, elastic nature, and world class infrastructure provided by Oracle, making it that much easier for them to adopt the cloud for their ERP. 

That’s why ERP customers are considering the cloud and urgently wanting answers to practical questions such as – “How do I get there from here? And, which of my applications are best suited for the cloud and what do I do next?”. 

How Do ERP customers Get There?

The Oracle Cloud Enterprise Architecture team address these and other open questions with a very pragmatic approach on taking the journey to the cloud operating model from a practitioner’s viewpoint.

In light of this growing ? ERP to Cloud ? challenge, the team host ? Journey to the Cloud ? (J2C) workshops, events designed to break down the mammoth task of cloud migration into a more manageable framework.

We will share insight into Oracle cloud technologies for enterprise and how organisations can begin their ERP cloud journey or capitalise on existing cloud investment, as well as real-world examples of moving a large, complex organisation into the cloud using a hybrid model. 

The ? Journey to the Cloud ? workshops are starting now. For more information or to register, you can contact today your Oracle local representative.