Oracle Applications Unlimited gets thumbs up and promised investment

Earlier this week, the software giant published results of a survey, conducted last autumn, that shows 14,000 respondents were not only broadly satisfied with Oracle’s support, but are planning to increase their investments. What’s more, that’s across the board, with upgrades and expansions of everything from the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle’s Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World. Oracle now says that thousands of Applications Unlimited customers are realising measurable savings, with integrated, end-to-end industry processes – and trots out customers to prove it. One, Jim Gordon, chief architect of enterprise systems at Juniper Networks, says: “It was imperative for Juniper Networks to upgrade our existing PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel implementations to the latest versions, so we could retool our underlying business processes and take advantage of the industry-leading best practices now available from Oracle. “We will benefit not only from a standard platform with standardised best practice business processes, but also automated, cross-functional integration and a guarantee of support for integrations and upgrades in the future through Applications Unlimited.” And Chris Dunham, IS director at Michigan Sugar, says: “Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise implementations are integral components to Michigan Sugar’s HR success. Therefore, upgrading to the latest PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM 9.0 seemed like a logical next step for us. Knowing that we have a lifetime support policy, we can confidently continue to invest broadly with Oracle and reap the benefits – including increased flexibility and expansion of our management functionalities.” Karl Schosser, vice president of technology at Hunt Building Company, concludes: “With Applications Unlimited, we can pick and choose what product upgrades are right for our business. We don’t have to follow Oracle’s upgrade plan or any other customer’s pace. This helps us better manage strategic planning and budgetary constraints. “JD Edwards World A9.1 is a proof point of Applications Unlimited. We took a very aggressive timeline for our upgrade to this latest release and found that the new tools made it a very simple, painless, step-by-step process. The web interface and the import/export functionality were also key factors in our decision to upgrade.”