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STOP ME BEFORE I CUSTOMIZE ANOTHER APP: CLOUD CONFESSIONS FROM TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES

A technology executive in charge of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for a major manufacturing company made a painful confession at last year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference: “I was a customizer. I have customized. It’s been 32 days since my last customization.”

Stop Me Before I Customize Another App! CLOUD CONFESSIONS FROM TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES

BY JOHN SOAT

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STOP ME BEFORE I CUSTOMIZE ANOTHER APP: CLOUD CONFESSIONS FROM TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES

Soul-wrenching guilt notwithstanding, the tech exec was making light of a significant factor in many traditional business applications, complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps in particular: customization.

A Brief History of Customization Enterprise software applications such as ERP were intended as out-of-the-box alternatives to the hodgepodge of built-from-scratch, back-office business applications many organizations developed internally during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. As companies layered on customizations meant to address compliance-mandated, country-specific, or customer-oriented requirements, those applications turned into business anchors instead of business enablers.

Customization limits a company’s ability to address changing business conditions quickly or even to take advantage of new features in the software when they’re offered. And customizations are not upgrade-friendly; they must be migrated over with every new version of the software—a costly, time-consuming, and painful process.

Cloud computing restricts such customization, which was initially thought of as a limiting factor for cloud but is now emerging as a fundamental benefit. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) users are realizing they can take advantage of best practices built into their cloud applications easily and quickly, helping them to standardize processes and scale workloads much more quickly, thus making the company more efficient.

Extending Best Practices Nevertheless, there will be times when a business needs to adopt a unique strategy that makes it stand out from competitors. “If I have a way to tailor cloud applications to meet my needs, to extend their capabilities, to add different sorts of functionalities to make myself more competitive, then those are things I’m going to do,” says Steve Daheb, senior vice president of cloud technology at Oracle.

That’s why cloud users are looking to add cutting-edge capabilities to their SaaS apps, and to hook up those apps to other cloud services to create entirely new business offerings and processes—such as offering itemized accounting reports to clients online, as Oracle customer Solairus Aviation is planning. It helps explain why the market for cloud integration tools and services is growing rapidly.

At the same time, a piecemeal approach to incorporating cloud services into enterprise business processes has led to a variegated and compatibility-challenged cloud environment within many companies—which also helps explain the expanding cloud integration market.

“The cloud was supposed to be easy,” Daheb says. “The multi-vendor approach to cloud is starting to cause some of the same problems that customers were trying to get away from in the first place,” he says.

Real competitive advantage comes in chaining various cloud services together to create new paths for data and processing to work horizontally across the business, rather than within a single work unit or solitary application.

That’s where Oracle sees its platform as a service (PaaS) toolset—which includes services for business processes and platform integration—as a primary differentiator. “Just one of the categories we provide with our cloud services is actually what you use to connect the different pieces,” Daheb says.

“If I have a way to tailor

cloud applications to meet my needs, to extend their capabilities, to add different sorts of functionalities to make myself more competitive, then those are things I’m going to do.”

—STEVE DAHEB

Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology, Oracle

Copyright © 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information, visit cloud.oracle.com

JOHN SOAT IS SENIOR WRITER IN ORACLE'S CONTENT CENTRAL ORGANIZATION.

PREVIOUSLY, HE WAS A FREELANCE WRITER AND MULTI-MEDIA PRODUCER SPECIALIZING IN THE INTERSECTION OF BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY.

Oracle PaaS includes the Java programming language and Oracle Database—both widely used and familiar to millions of developers, making configurations simpler. And, unlike on-premises software, Oracle Cloud applications configured with Oracle PaaS remain fully upgradeable—so a unique business strategy stays intact.

Postmodern ERP Enterprise software customization is widespread. The vast majority (90 percent) of ERP users have incorporated at least “some level” of customization in their systems, according to those surveyed in 2014 by Panorama Consulting Solutions.

But such customization is a relic of a fading era, says research firm Gartner. “Heavily customized ERP implementations” should be relegated to “legacy” status, indicating their increasing irrelevance in the modern enterprise environment, Gartner says. “The ERP suite is being deconstructed into postmodern ERP that will result in a more federated, loosely coupled ERP environment with much of the functionality sourced as cloud services or via business process outsourcers,” the firm predicts.

Still, Oracle acknowledges that the migration of enterprise systems to the cloud will take time before most, if not all, of that processing is done online—due in part to past customizations. The company will work with its customers, Daheb says, to migrate those applications over time. “Our background is in selling apps, so we are intimately familiar with those customizations,” he says.

But it doesn’t have to take ten years. With Oracle’s rapid deployment tools and services, companies can quickly gain the competitive advantages of agile cloud technology—and modern, collaborative capabilities—even when transferring non-Oracle application workloads.

As far as customers losing added-on competitive features when migrating an on-premises application to a cloud service, Oracle will address that concern as well. “We’ll either have that functionality or we can work with them to make sure that [the cloud system] is on par and symmetrical with what they have on site,” Daheb says.

Oracle is unique in the cloud market because it offers a complete suite of enterprise SaaS applications, from ERP to human capital management (HCM) to customer experience (CX), as well as a deep set of PaaS tools and middleware, including databases and programming languages. So if there is a need to differentiate their cloud apps, says Daheb, “we provide [customers] the tools and the capability to do that in a simpler, more automated, more scalable way.”

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