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Cloudy at Oracle OpenWorld

There are two ways of using the cloud: Buying services from it, or moving on-premise applications to it. At its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, Oracle Corp. is emphasizing it can offer both to customers.

In his presentations company executive chairman Larry Ellison stressed the ease of moving Oracle applications to its cloud (see below), but there were also an avalanche of updates announced, including

–Oracle ERP Cloud release 9, with a host of improvements to its component parts (Oracle Financials Cloud, Procurement Cloud,  Project Portfolio Management Cloud.) So Financials Cloud sports a simpler mobile interface for delivering real-time financial results, the Mobile Financial Reporting Center is now integrated with Oracle Social Network for better collaboration and a new “sunburst” view helps understand data.

Procurement Cloud now adds Local Punchout Item Search, which unifies the search and browse experience to enable local search of supplier punchout catalog content. This is designed to help people quickly find what they are looking for and minimize the changes to look and feel across supplier sites.

It also adds New Supplier Registration Request in self-service procurement, which allows people to quickly request a new supplier that is not yet set up. Also Supplier Import and Update Enhancements have been  improved to include additional information and allow updates as well as new supplier creation.

–Oracle Sales Cloud release 9 has new smartphone and tablet applications (Oracle Voice, Oracle Mobilytics, and Oracle Sales Cloud Call Report) , prebuilt and drill-down reporting capabilities for analytics, new partner relationship management capabilities, and industry-specific solutions.

–Oracle Social Cloud adds new modules called Social Intelligence Center, Content Curation, Quick Post, and Social Media Mixer. The company said these will help organizations more effectively manage social capabilities and prove the business value of social programs through enhanced customer visibility and real-time reporting.

–Looking ahead, it previewed Mobile Application Accelerator for its new Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, a cloud-based offering that brings mobile application development capabilities to staff with no previous software development experience. “With Mobile Application Accelerator, program managers, power users, and business professionals can develop mobile applications quickly and visually through their web browser,” the company said.

–What the company called major updates across the entire Fusion Middleware stack, including new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and on-premises cloud offerings as well as mobile, security, content management, and data management and integration capabilities.

There are six new cloud services—Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, Mobile Cloud Service, Integration Cloud Service, Process Cloud Service,  Node Cloud Service, and Java SE Cloud Service.

–14 mobile applications for the E-Business Suite 12.1.3 and up. These enable mobile approvals for expenses, requisitions, purchase orders, and more;
expense capture and management; mobile timecards for capturing  time worked with minimal data entry, enter time for payroll and projects.

As reported by Computerworld U.S., on Tuesday Ellison put on a demonstration to show how easy it now is to move existing Oracle databases and Oracle applications to its cloud with only a few clicks. At the same time he said the system works with hybrid data centres.

But “Ellison’s talk left a few important questions unanswered for customers considering such an arrangement, such as whether (enterprises) will gain savings at all three layers compared to running systems on-premises,” said reporter Chris Kanarakus.

“Given the ongoing price war in the IaaS market, Oracle may be assuming it can make little or no profit on the IaaS layer, but generate big money on cloud applications and PaaS..”

Howard Solomon
Howard Solomon
Currently a freelance writer, I'm the former editor of ITWorldCanada.com and Computing Canada. An IT journalist since 1997, I've written for several of ITWC's sister publications including ITBusiness.ca and Computer Dealer News. Before that I was a staff reporter at the Calgary Herald and the Brampton (Ont.) Daily Times. I can be reached at hsolomon [@] soloreporter.com

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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