Oracle Open World 2019 Participation Report

EBSS participated in Oracle Open World 2019

Oracle Open World (OOW) is one of the biggest IT event and conference in the world which is organized by Oracle Corporation every fall.

In OOW, there are all the on-premise/Cloud products and its appropriate solutions that are released recently or to be released shortly by Oracle. Also a lot of partner companies introduce unique solutions/experiences using oracle products/platforms.

I felt that the scale of the event was slightly smaller than usual this year, however there were more than 2000 individual sessions and 200 exhibitor booths, also it looked the event was a great success and participants were really interested in the various latest solutions and products.

Key Note by Larry Ellison (the Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer)

Recently Oracle is more accelerating to transform their main business to Cloud and in order to strengthen the approach, Larry Ellison has published the official collaboration with Microsoft and VMware.

As for the collaboration with Microsoft, the certified interconnect called multi-Cloud will be started between Oracle Cloud and Azure. (They have already been connected each DC at East coast and London)

Also Larry said that Oracle supports MS Products like windows server and SQL server…etc on Oracle Cloud. Since Oracle is lagging behind in the Cloud market, I think this is quite a big decision for Oracle to take the market share back.

And in order to realize the practical performance (low latency) on interconnected Cloud, each DC must be physically closer. Then Oracle increases appropriate DCs all over the world then they will start the interconnect at West coast, Asia and EU region within FY20.

As of now, Oracle has 16 DC locations in the world and Larry committed that they will increase DC to 36 locations until the end of 2020. Larry also strongly said they would definitely pass AWS’ 22 location in the near future.

And as you know, VMware has the world largest share of IT virtualization market.This collaboration makes hybrid Cloud (on-premise platform will partially remain) implementation and operation much easier and flexible.

• Lift and Shift becomes possible from VMware on-premise to WMware on Oracle Cloud
• Oracle Apps on VMware environment on both on-premise and Cloud will be officially supported by both Oracle and VMware technical support.

By Oracle certifying VMware virtualization, user can obtain much more flexibility to transfer Oracle apps licenses to other platform. (The scope of Oracle Trusted Partitioning that is applied at a licensing qualification and audit of Oracle Application will be expanded)

As a result of this collaboration and certification, almost all the major public Cloud services can certify VMware. I could say that this collaboration is really inevitable for Oracle to begin the multi-Cloud with Microsoft to make their solutions be more practical and valuable for customers.

The catch copy is “Autonomous is being expanded to OS area, not only for DB”. Oracle released Oracle Autonomous Linux. In last OOW in 2018, Oracle just released Oracle Autonomous Database on Gen2 Cloud, on top of that, Oracle could cover OS area.

No downtime by online patching and autonomous provisioning/scaling/tuning are unique benefit and these functions obviously can reduce administrator’s periodic workload and overhead.
※Oracle bought Ksplice in 2011 that had the latest Online Patching technology.

Larry said that this was the only one unique OS at the moment and to be provided as totally free and finally he got a lot of applause and cheering from audience.

As the last topic of keynote, Oracle published Always Free service in addition to Oracle Cloud Free Tier (Cloud Free Trial Program). This service is to provide the endless free trial for Autonomous Database within the limited resources (refer to above slides for details)

Larry lastly said “It never expires, You can have it forever for free as long as you use it”.

Always Free service provides more capability to utilize trial Cloud instance with better spec by combining with the current trial program that includes $300 credit and 30days free trial.

I think the purpose of this measure is obviously to capture the potential customers, but on the other hand, it seems that Oracle would like to increase the implementation partner and Cloud application developers to accelerate expanding the market share.

Anyway, in customer point of view, all of these measures and competition among big Cloud services will make options of Cloud utilization increase much, which means customer can more reasonably and closely use the Cloud platform and applications. I could say that Cloud business is now in the age of civil wars and it’s really interesting.

Exhibitor Pickup

AXXANA　(Phoenix for Oracle)

Axxana was established by OBs from data storage designer and manufacturer and around 50 employees are working for the company. Phoenix is their unique solution and focusing on BCP, and zero data loss and rapid recovery are the biggest sales points. Typically, big company operate secondary data center as DR (disaster recovery) measure but investment will not be low and midsize company does not normally take this option.

Main customer of Phoenix is this types of midsize or small company. The box called as Phoenix Black Box like a small fort will protect the data under any of disaster on the earth like earthquake, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, lightning strikes, fire…etc.

I saw the demo and they realized that the storage box was totally unbreakable under any condition and could be recovered the data it was really like phoenix.The concept of design and solution are not complex but really deep and I felt the hot soul of this storage design master.To find out this kind of interesting solution is one of the biggest favorite part of OOW.

SAP　(Live Digital Manufacturing)

As you know, SAP is at the top of ERP market now and a big competitor of Oracle, however recently SAP exhibits their solution in Oracle event. Initially I was expecting there were some collaboration with Oracle either infrastructure or application layer, but according to SAP presenter, there was no collaboration so far. I was a bit surprised that somebody who are not collaborating with Oracle can exhibit in OOW. The big 2 companies could be what a tolerant….

According to the presenter, “Everybody knows OOW is one of the biggest IT conference and there are definitely a lot of opportunities for sales promotion and building relationships with partners and customers. We should work hard together and brush up each other like this”. I understood his statement.

On the other hand, there are miniature manufacturing lines with several stages in the booth, and was doing the live demo to show several manufacturing KPIs like stage wise facility/labor productivity, yield rate, rejection rate..etc, also by utilizing AI machine learning, analyze the trend of each failure and propose the appropriate improvement. These are working on SAP Cloud platform.

The sales points are high performance UI by in memory data base and one stop implementation from edge device installment to application set up on SAP Cloud. It was interesting to see even Oracle user often stopped at the booth and see the live demo and ask questions.

Session Pick up

Oracle SOAR to the Cloud : It's the last upgrade You will ever do

Oracle Soar is the technical upgrade service for migrating to Oracle Cloud (SaaS) from on-premise application and contains 2 main services that one is the technical upgrade tools to automate configuration and data transfer, other one is the professional consulting service by Oracle technical team.

Since Oracle SaaS applications are being auto upgraded once every quarter, then this solution is also called as “the last upgrade”. As of Sep 2019, EBS, People Soft and Hyperion are in the scope of this service and the scope will be expanded soon.

Actually this was not the first time to see this session and the technical/cost details were not shared in previous session, however in this OOW, Oracle firstly published these details. High level approach and processes as follows.

1. Customer to fill out pre-defined discovery questionnaire, and execute several discovery scripts on legacy platform
2. Based on the discovery activity above, Oracle to estimate total cost（To judge do or don’t do transaction data migration at this stage）
   ※Assumption is that CRP0 is already completed and that there is no major GAPs or Solutions are specified and agreed if there is.
3. Extract all the configurations into CSV file from on-premise apps by pre-developed tool
4. Edit the CSV via a tool for new function or new/update configurations
5. Load the edited CSV to Cloud
6. 6. UAT/ Transaction data migration(if any)/ Go-live
   ※Master migration is a part of configuration transfer.

According to the presentation, standard project lead time is 20 weeks without add-on program migration. (Basically add-on cannot be migrated to Cloud apps)
※if the standard function on Cloud can cover the legacy add-on, the migration is done by modifying source files of the set up.

And Oracle committed that the cost was totally fixed price and the invoice would be sent to customer after Go/live, and the audience applauded.

And according to the other session, certain customer said the actual lead time was beyond 20weeks but there was no additional charges. This billing solution could be a big factor to more accelerate making customers move to Cloud. Oracle Consulting service also introduced that there are already 36 SOAR customers who could publish the company name. It looked that audience was really interested in SOAR and asking a lot of questions in the session. There is no doubt to increase SOAR customers in the near future.

Kohl’s Finance Transformation Value Realization using Oracle ERP and EPM Cloud

Kohl's is one of the big retailing company, Head quarter is at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, there are more than 1000 locations in USA. Their competitive low cost management provides many brand goods to market with reasonable price and doing a good fight with E-commerce so far, and recent KPI is healthier than competitors.

Actually I did not see so many sessions that introduce implementing SaaS enterprise modules for more than billion companies but in this OOW I saw those experiences in sessions and booth. Kohl’s had as many as 6 different legacy systems in finance area. And the factors to decide to move to Cloud are that each legacy will be de-supported shortly and that there is a lot of time and human overhead among these systems

The scope is 13 modules, actual implementation lead time is 12 months (total 19 months including internal discussion).Typically, We (EBSS) propose 6-9 months to implement ERP/SCM Cloud, but this project took a little longer. I assume that such 6 legacy systems made the implementation more complex.

According to VP of Kohl’s there were 2 critical success factors below.

1. Totally uncompromising selection and discussion to select implementation partner and new application.
2. Top-Down BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering)

Typical Japanese company is especially not good at no.2. It seems that actual number of Cloud implementation to big company in Japan is much less than that in the US and EU region.

In case of Cloud implementation, add on program development cannot be a final weapon to complete the project like in case of EBS implementation. I reminded that preliminary BPR discussion with key users and making a consensus becomes much more key success factor for Cloud implementation.

Oracle E-Business Suite: Strategy and Updates

Oracle has been more focusing on Cloud now but EBS development team is still motivated to move forward. As previously announced, 12.2 or later version will be supported until at least 2030, however the team said that this did not mean closing and shrinking and kept enhancing and providing values to customers.

As for the new feature details on each version, please refer to the release note on oracle support page.

Overall, transforming to HTML UI and getting rid of the existing forms UI, and summary dashboard which is called command center has been added to main modules. User can drill down to each transactions at the command center instead of query on forms UI. This change makes certain UI be more user/mobile friendly.

Order Management Developer said “the current shipping execution operation is complex ever for me, new UI could help a lot of shipping users”. Sounds a bit self-deprecating.

And Oracle said EBS and Cloud hybrid was getting normal then and the message to market had slightly been changed from last year. But I think this is more practical and acceptable for market.

Many EBS heavy users listened to this session and looked everybody made sense on this message and asked more details.

EBSS also has many EBS customers who are thinking how to move to Cloud or stay on-premise like the audience in this session. Some of the customers have already requested us to do deep dive investigation. If you are thinking of Cloud migration or what’s the best way to upgrade, please feel free to let us know, we are really happy to help.

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