Oracle users fail to get that moving apps to cloud means business transformation – Gartner

Big business users of Oracle wares are failing to understand that moving applications to the cloud means a business transformation – notoriously tough and organizationally complex – not just a technical project. According to Gartner, although Oracle Cloud Application (OCA) products are maturing, users haven't grasped what the …

[Pascal Monett]

Incredible

It never ceases to astonish me how software vendors (Borkzilla, Oracle, etc) redefine the business environment without for one second asking businesses if that is what they need.

More astonishing is the fact that businesses appear to not mind very much, given the lack of lawsuits over being forced to change when no change was needed from a business point of view.

And we're not talking about mom&pop shops, we're talking about Fortune 1000 companies. How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?

And I'm supposed to believe that these Fortune 1000 CEOs have no clue as to what they got themselves into ?

That is a hard pill to swallow.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Incredible

How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?

If they were going to do that wouldn't they have done a long time ago?

[6underground]

Re: Incredible

It's summed up in the first paragraph, they see it as just a "technical project".

Fools and their money are soon parted or in the case of Fortune 1000 CEOs, other people's money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Incredible

Health Care is the only area I've seen where this doesn't happen to the same extent, there's an understanding that a "technical change" may well have impact on patient care, workflows etc in a way that doesn't happen in other sectors.

[Potemkine!]

Re: Incredible

Those software vendors know who they are talking to, and that's the bean counters.

CEOs nowadays are managers, not entrepreneurs. They are here to maximize short term profits for shareholders, not to have a strategic vision of what the companies will be in ten years.

In a word, they don't give a damn if the companies collapse in 5 years: they won't be there anymore, somebody else will have to deal with the consequences.

[sreynolds]

Re: Incredible

To be fair CEOs were never innovators only communicators. The decisions were always made by other people usually founders etc.

[Golgafrinch]

Oh dear ...

Spring is sprung,

The cloud is ris,

I wonder where

My data is.

As regards the 'business consultancies' (what a word - the number of companies I've witnessed going belly-up whilst said "consultancies" would walk away, cheque in hand, claiming that their 'advice had not been properly implemented') "Gartner rated consultants claiming to help out in business transformation related to moving applications to the cloud. Deloitte, Acc[id]enture, PwC and KPMG were the top four, in that order."

I'd like to see them all at the bottom of a lake - adorned by Ronald Reagan's coffin, because that's when the rot set in.

[Anonymous Coward]

They may be the experts in spinning out one side-conversation-at-a-conference into an overwrought report on a new and emerging industry trend, but I have to say I'm shocked even Gartner managed to find enough Oracle Cloud users to put this report together.

Probably just faster to ring round them all and tell them over the phone directly!

[katrinab]

I thought the whole point of using Oracle or SAP, rather than something like Xero or Sage, was that you could customise it to your requirements,

and that's why people were willing to pay a 7 or 8 figure sum for these products rather than a 3 or 4 figure some for an off-the-shelf package.

[Fred Daggy]

Managers and their empires

Perhaps.

I like to watch my organisation shoehorn canned solutions, especially SAAS to fit their needs. Rather than take advantage of all that the external provider offers. Then wonder why none of the efficiencies were realised. Nor the cheapness.

Of course, as others have pointed out, cloud migration is seen as technical project. The other, that our organisation is a bit like the three cartoon kids sitting on each others shoulders, wearing trenchcoat and hat, pretending to be an adult. We just pretend to be a medium size organisation, when actually, were a bunch of warring small organisations.

And then there is the 20 or so Oracle JDE implementations that are so different from each other that they may as well be different products entirely.

[a_yank_lurker]

Customization

My group writes custom, internal code to serve our customers. It is one our competitive features that we can do some fairly serious custom code to support our clients. Leisure Suit Larry and the fraudsters Gartner ignore the fact off the shelf software has limited utility for many business critical applications. Many businesses need custom code to be competitive and often the custom code is what gives the business an advantage.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Customization

"often the custom code is what gives the business an advantage"

Sometimes it's actually essential to the business.

[Lonpfrb]

Re: Customization

"Sometimes it's actually essential to the business."

Sometimes, yet mostly it is not, more likely just a business preference based on what their previous application did. The data is that 60% or more of custom code is not used in a typical package implementation. It's a testament to poor leadership and lack of focus on the true business objectives.

So while some think cloud is about the financial advantage of moving from capital investment in infrastructure to operational expenses for services, there's also the possibility that the C-suite just wants the usual processing done at low cost of ownership and without the option to create a money pit for little benefit.

If you really do have something distinctive to do the clean core and side extension model will provide the best of both in enabling innovation without those extensions compromising the core..

You might call that SaaS + PaaS.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Customization

Some industries are also heavily regulated so moving data to the cloud could be illegal depending on what data is moved, etc.

[Cederic]

Re: Customization

Which industries are those? In which countries?

I hear a lot of worry about putting data in the cloud but correctly protected data is correctly protected whether you bought the server or someone else did.

[OhForF']

Correctly protected data

The question is when is data "correclty protected"?

It may make a difference where the server storing the data is located.

The main issue seems to be whether the data is processed (on premises) in UK or somewhere that has adequately similar legal protection or somewhere else.

If the somewhere else is somewhere basically giving free access for any number of TLA organizations with no legal standing for you or your customers it may make a difference.

It doesn't really matter that much whose server it is but it may be a problem if you can't even figure out where that server processing your data is located in the fluffy white stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Misleading headline

I've helped a number of customers move their Oracle products from datacentres to non-Oracle public cloud, without losing the ability to customise their installations.

Moving to the cloud doesn't necessarily mean moving to a SaaS model, which is where you often lose the ability to customise. If you're using IaaS or in some cases PaaS approaches, you're not usually anywhere near as constrained as the SaaS offering.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you have to run the Oracle stack, only the Oracle stack, and forever the Oracle stack without any business-specific customization?

Who in their right mind is buying into this hyper expensive constant-financial-drain nonsense in the first place?

Why isn't there a mass rebellion from the consumer/business base that has to pay for all this?

Guess you get the pricing you deserve, and Oracle has a lot of fools for "customers".

[Lonpfrb]

"Who in their right mind is buying into this hyper expensive constant-financial-drain nonsense in the first place?"

I remember when relational database was the thing that RTI and Informix sold product excellence to the IT department, while Oracle sold to the Business and that success allowed their initially inferior product to get the investment to be equal or better than their competition.

So Oracle have a long history of selling to the business who will not take a technology or even financial perspective on the costs and benefits.

The SaaS subscription model is vendor specific and may well obscure the actual cost, both financial and technical..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked with EBS 20+ years, one of it's strong point was that, done well, customisation cpould make it work well, despite the UI, there were some improvements as the UI changed to javascript, but there were still weird exceptions around searches, capitalisation etc...

Then we have "Cloud", in many respects it's EBS from a few years ago (talking Supply Chain, MFG and Planning), with one thing missing and another thing being forced on users... The ability to Customise is missing, you don't like it? Tough. What is forced on peoole are the Quarterly Updates, usually optional for one, perhaps two quarters, after that mandatory implementation, unless they are part of some config you can squirrel into to disable... You just have to find it before it's mandatory...

And please don't ask about Planning, I was used to ASCP (or VCP in it's later incarnations), The Cloud version, as of 22A is only slightly better than the EBS inbuilt MRP, something I first used almost 30 years ago and very basic. Pretty poor IMO