Oracle and in the face of the planet

Oracle has long been a leader in global business solutions. But when one mentions the words Oracle and ERP, the idea that easy comes to mind is all those shopping spree that Oracles has done in the past few years in a desperate move to outshine its closes competitor SAP as the number provider of ERP solutions. But as I blogged in the past, I do not see anything wrong with these shopping sprees. My thing is that if Oracle can afford it and the potential acquisition gets a good deal, then fine. This healthy competition between SAP and Oracle will result in the consumers benefiting in the end. This is what business competition is all about.

Perhaps the United Nations thinks the same. There is nothing wrong with Oracle's moves. The important thing is the quality of the products. So much so that the United Nations development Programme (UNDP) has deployed and implemented an Oracle ERP module on a mass scale spreading out to all continents. This partnership is getting stronger with new efforts in trying to increase the user base and penetrating new segments in the market. It has been reported that UNDP has saved about 10 percent in time and money and has decided to embark on a new campaign of using PeopleSoft.


The romance between Sun Microsystems and Oracle has served greater benefits to the consumer public. New developments spring from the partnership include some products designed to benefit organizations in all aspects from economical to procedural. One of these benefits is the an implementation of ERP which does away with so many servers at the local level. Small and medium sized companies can install a smaller number of computer servers to facilitate their operations and thus save money.

An example of the "beneficiaries" of Oracle is a hospital company in Ohio City. Because of better hospital resource management, there has been an increase in the number of lives saved or reduced extent of loss or intensity of injury incurred on people. But along the way to the hospital's success in better management, the encountered problem with an Oracle implementation failed. But the mistake was not mainly due to the inefficiency or Oracle but in the people implementing it who depended heavily on the software as a magical cure it all remedy even to basic problems requiring only a simple common sense. In social speak, this incident is called an area for new lessons learned. Oracle ERP softwares are simply mechanical instructions and for now, they cannot totally "think for themselves".

Oracle's easy adaptability to local markets has greatly helped smaller companies in poorest countries. In Brazil, Oracle has fast become a favorite ERP application as many companies have experience the benefits. Because of globalization, many companies from poorest countries and smaller economies have to face the industry giants from the industrialized nations. But with the help of ERP solutions, the competition may not be as tough as could be expected.

Faster Growth for PeopleSoft ERP Applications in The Public Sector

Who says that enterprise resource planning is only for the business sector? Wikipedia defines ERP as "a system to integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules."

So there it goes, it can be used for any organization trying to unify high volumes of data processes.

To prove that ERP is gaining more widespread use in the public sector, in two of the largest school districts in the United States, The School District of Palm Beach County in Florida (having 165,000 students) and Fort Bend Independent School District in Texas (having 68,000 students) PeopleSoft ERP applications is experiencing continued strong growth. These two giant school districts have recently partnered with company specializing in systems integration and Oracle Certified Partner called eVerge Group so that they can convert their financial and human resource systems to PeopleSoft.

Accordingly, during the last twelve months, there has been a marked increase in the number of currently customers of PeopleSoft who have upgraded their existing PeopleSoft applications and acquiring new functionalities. Records showed that those customers had been upgrading to PeopleSoft version 8.9. Even the newly released Version 9, just release in early 2007, has enjoyed relatively huge purchases.
Looking back, the Cleveland State University licensed PeopleSoft's software for tracking student records in 1997. The system was adopted by the California State University system in the early 2000s.

Indeed, when talking about ERP, it is the business sector that easily comes to mind. But the fact is that PeopleSoft ERP applications have already been traditionally popular in the public sector in most of the United States. This can be attributed to PeopleSoft's ease of use and great flexibility in address unique local government as well as needs of school districts like in the field of commitment accounting and budgeting, as well as departmental position requirements.
Despite past issues such as the Decmber 1999 quality and performance issues complaints of seven of the eight "Big Ten" Midwestern universities and the California State University complaint of having spent $500 million on a deficient system, PeopleSoft has now stabilized and made more robust as it is now part of the Oracle family of applications. Customers of PeopleSoft can now benefit from the new middleware applications that enhance the integration applications and databases throughout their organization.

Oracle is in very aggressive in all of its efforts to gain the top spot in the business software applications industry. The number one spot is now being held by SAP. The move has result in Oracle making shopping sprees of other top notch applications.

Well, definitely, Oracle is doing its best efforts to enhance itself should it want to be on top. And these enhancements can trickle down to other products as well, including of course PeopleSoft.

The Oracle Fusion

When Oracle Corporation has announced that it will release a new suite of ERP related applications dubbed as Fusion, the news greatly clarified the vision of Oracle for its applications strategies which has been a point of concern in relation to customers of PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought for $10 billion. Fusion was expected to serve as a point of migration for customers all the three Oracle platforms.

Oracle Fusion is a middleware. It is portfolio of standards bases software application products. Oracle Fusion spans many services which include J2EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. But lot of the products which are being marketed under the Fusion Middleware banner are not really middleware products themselves. Fusion is just some sort of re-branding move for many products of Oracle outside of their core database and applications software offerings.

Another intended use of Oracle Fusion is to support the development, deployment, and management of Service-Oriented Architecture. This middleware can easily leverage existing software investments such as from IBM, Microsoft and SAP (All of them are Oracle's competitors in ERP), through a pluggable architecture.

Oracle Fusion is a Java-based, service-oriented architecture that has an automated upgrade process from PeopleSoft, Oracle and J.D. Edwards applications. The Oracle Fusion Architecture can provide a robust, very high performance and highly available computing environment. With all these factors that the Oracle Fusion can deliver, a business can have a rich catalog of standard business processes in a wide range of areas such as CRM, ERP, and supply chain management. Evolution is something that cannot be avoided in business as nobody would want to set up a business without having to grow. With Oracle fusion, a company can have a dynamic business process portfolio that can evolve with the company.

Oracle has been careful in defining the line between Oracle and PeopleSoft as both could be though of as one but they need separate marketing image as well. While working on the Fusion, Oracle has made sure it maintained some separation between its Oracle and PeopleSoft development teams.

Oracle Fusion will surely be a great challenge to Oracle's nearest rival in the ERP industry – SAP AG. Oracle has seen Fusion as a revitalizing factor in its aggressive pursuing of leadership in the business applications market. The applications market has a wide array of areas for software solution development including software solutions used for managing corporate functions like sales, human resources and supplier relationships.

As a watcher of competitions among these software giants, I get excited everyday with new developments. SAP is now aggressively marketing its SAP xApps, a range of software products targeted at specific industries and have smaller footprints compared to other ERP implementations. Examples of the xApps include SAP xApp Cost and Quotation Management (SAP xCQM), SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII), SAP xApp Resource and Portfolio Management (SAP xRPM), SAP xApp Integrated Exploration and Production (SAP xIEP). Despite the develop of a variety of business solutions, the development of software solutions to "Fuse" these things together is always catching up.