Oracle finally moves to its own Cloud

Oracle has recently been making some noise about its successful transition to its own Cloud services. There’s been a lot of high-fives and back-slapping over the fact that it has taken SIX YEARS to transition most of its business to its own Cloud.

The worst part though is that it isn’t even fully migrated yet. Accounts receivable, order management, and analytics are still missing from Oracle’s Cloud line-up.

Given that it has taken Oracle six years to only partially migrate to its own Cloud, what is your timeline?

Why has it taken so long?

Oracle is using itself as a guinea pig to develop its own Cloud services.

When it first started the move, Oracle was an unknown in the Cloud arena, and has seemed to time the development of its Cloud offering alongside its own transition into the Cloud. This approach is the reason why it has taken so long. Oracle has been on the same Cloud discovery process as its clients, while selling them the dream of Cloud at the same time. Oracle has yet to realise this dream for itself.

The Oracle Cloud migration has involved gradually moving business processes, starting with smaller moves of financial reporting, talent management, and marketing in 2012 through 2014.

“We want to use our own experience to validate that the products are functional and scalable, and do meet the needs of an organisation with the complexity of Oracle. Of course, we also want to use the Oracle use case to test new technologies and new ways of doing things.”

Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President of Oracle

This guinea pig approach of using itself to test its own products is probably why we hear that many of Oracle’s Cloud products are only fit for Oracle. We’ve spoken to many organisations considering the jump to Cloud that have realised that the jump is too far. There are two key reasons for this:

  1. The solution they need don’t exist in the Oracle Cloud (because Oracle hasn’t built it for itself yet)
  2. The organisation’s systems are too heavily customised for specific use cases (Oracle’s) that don’t fit its needs

When will Oracle completely move to its Cloud?

Oracle still hasn’t fully transitioned to the Cloud yet. The big missing pieces we’ve identified are modules for accounts receivable, order management, and Oracle’s global business intelligence infrastructure. But how long will these take to transition?

“As we moved the transactional system to the Cloud, we have made the conscious decision to try to leave the analytics as stable as possible. But we also want to move that to Cloud to a data warehouse built on the new Oracle Autonomous Database. With Cloud products like ERP Cloud and HCM Cloud, there is embedded analytics – the Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence. But there is always a need for more sophisticated analysis for which there is still a need of a warehouse. That is another big piece that we are working on.”

Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President of Oracle

It sounds like Oracle won’t be moving fully to the Cloud anytime soon then…

Don’t be Oracle’s next guinea pig

Because of their approach, Oracle has hit many of the same stumbling blocks and snags as its customers who are moving to the Cloud.

An example of this was its piecemeal transition of one system at a time to the Cloud. This meant that Oracle had to learn how to operate application-to-application integrations for the first time as it moved to a hybrid Cloud system. It then realised its monitoring tools weren’t sufficient so it had to quickly build up its capabilities there too. This two steps forward, one step back approach has been a consistent trend.

In the end, Oracle built up its Cloud strategy through trial and error but is now pushing that strategy as a one-size fits all solution, which it isn’t.

We want you to know that you have options. You don’t need to force the transition to the Cloud. Forget de-support dates and forced upgrades from the likes of Oracle and SAP. With a third-party support provider like Support Revolution, you can:

  • Stay on your current version for as long as you wish and still be fully supported (including customisations)
  • Be sure of a great, attentive support service with rigorous SLAs, ensuring you receive high-quality support 24/7
  • Save at least 50% on your support costs, which you can then invest in new technologies
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