Oracle set to grow applications on revolutionary ‘Daily Business Close’

A ‘Daily Business Close’, described as the closest thing so far to senior execs and managers getting an entirely configurable daily online ‘newspaper’ detailing every key aspect of their business – across sales, marketing, procurement, manufacturing, the supply chain and beyond – was Oracle’s extraordinary promise at its AppsWorld user conference in Amsterdam. Ron Wohl, Oracle’s European executive vice president, launched both concept and Oracle’s associated business intelligence (BI) products to some 5,000 delegates at Amsterdam’s RAI Centre, saying businesses no longer need be satisfied with spending millions of dollars on enterprise IT but only knowing what’s happening four times a year. “Good information is finally possible every day,” he said. “This Daily Business Close transforms management by guesswork, opinion, cell phone to management by facts.” It’s all about personalised business and manufacturing portals for any aspect of any company, but with a pivotal addition. It’s founded on Oracle’s ability now to enable all business information and applications to be served from a single database, plus its concept of a single data model for the enterprise globally via its entirely web-centric e-business suite 11i. Oracle’s initial BI products – Financials Intelligence, Customer Intelligence and Sales Intelligence – are out now, and the remainder are due to be released within the next 60 days. Mark Barranchea, Oracle’s senior vice president for applications development, described the new offer as revolutionary. “No one, including Oracle, has been able to do this,” he said. And he urged companies now to reconsider their existing IT environments of multiple ‘best of breed’ and legacy systems using older client-server architecture – meaning company data and automation fragmented across dozens, even hundreds, of systems around the globe. “Carbon-based systems – people – interact, but our silicon-based systems haven’t because there are silos of data and process automation,” he insisted – across different functions, channels, geographies, mediums and so on. With Oracle’s Daily Business Close, all that is reversed. Managers will see exactly the situation for their area of responsibility instantaneously, right out across the supply network if necessary, without waiting for data synchronisation to other systems, batch updates, non-automated links or whatever, he said. Different managers get different views, with a configurable functional health business dashboard covering their key performance indicators, alongside other information important to them and instant facilities for drilling down. “They’ll see how much scrap, how much rework, production rates, sales made, deliveries on time, supplier performance, buying trends and so on,” said Wohl. And the result, he said, will be better decisions, better controls, better profitability and lower costs. It looks at first glance a lot like mySAP.com or IFS portals, but Wohl insisted that whereas these are driven by multiple databases, with the inevitable data warehousing and integration, messaging and synchronisation and performance issues across sites and supply chains – and associated high costs – Oracle’s solution is uniquely founded on one real time “version of the truth”. He agreed that loose web application integration standards like XML are great and important, but said simply that these are never going to provide the low cost and speed of global data access and business process automation that constantly changing big businesses increasingly need. He added that although users will press for standardisation to make integrated multi-vendor ‘best of breed’ software work, “they haven’t got a prayer. The reality is no two vendors even perceive a process or a product the same way… It’s a pipe dream to think that there will be standards.” That said, Wohl conceded that companies are unlikely to go entirely Oracle all at once. And unless manufacturers elect to go for a ‘big bang’ implementation and an entirely Oracle world, they will only get the Daily Business Close for the elements under the Oracle data model. He advised: “You can take the whole piece… but the majority will take appropriate slices and then take more when they’re ready.” And he added: “There are no miracles, but integration is straightforward for third party and legacy systems.” But then you’re back to service levels available today from the others! Oracle boss Larry Ellison’s solution is simple – commit your IT budget to Oracle for the next five years and all your existing enterprise applications will be replaced with the 11i e-business suite at no additional cost – software, hardware migration and consultancy, the lot. When you analyse the deal you’ll probably find it costs no less than you’d budget with any of the others, given the usual loyalty discounts. But Oracle claims it’s already happening, and there’s no doubt that there is a lot on offer here. And with Oracle’s continued claims for its application suite of “best of category” throughout the enterprise modules – CRM, HR, APS and so on – the argument is there’s nothing to fear and everything to gain. For some it will certainly be enough to drive them to Oracle. Either way, Oracle expects faster uptake of 11i, now at version 6 following quarterly upgrade releases since its launch 18 months ago, as existing Oracle Applications 10.7 client-server users see the scale of the additional value of moving up. Already, 380 of Oracle’s 3,417 European customers have upgraded, and Sergio Giacoletto executive vice president Oracle in EMEA claimed a further 921 migrations were also underway. World-wide, 1,145 of the 12,000-strong Oracle customer base had upgraded to the e-business suite as of last week. He also paraded what were undeniably outstanding successes to the conference, most impressive of which was the Posco steel organisationm, expecting to save more than $4 billion in 10 years on big bang 11i. Said Giacoletto, “We expect our application divisions will grow faster than the database divisions… We expect the volume of business we had 18 months ago, which was the boom year. “Half our customer base will be on Oracle e-business suite 11i in four or five years. That’s do-able because of ASP, our upgrades and the move towards standardised software. Software is already being seen more like a service, a utility. So our prediction is predicated on the take up of all this.” Barranchea went further. “[Just as 80% of companies have Microsoft productivity tools on the desktop now] five years from now 70—80% of companies will be on ‘out of the box’ e-business suites for their enterprise applications.” And while he wasn’t expecting all of them to be on Oracle, the implication was that most of them would. “We’re here first. We’ve bet our company on this,” he said. Other 11i products launched at AppsWorld included Oracle’s long awaited asset management, Oracle eAM, developed in association with Alcoa and aimed at plant asset intesive manufacturers, and its 3D engineering data collaboration tool, with web-based CAD visualisation.