The Feature

Take the Oracle Financials Product Strategy Survey

August 12, 2010 on 7:07 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Financials Product Strategy is conducting a survey to gain insight into how customers are using Oracle Payments solution. This survey targets payments professionals (payment administrators, payables analysts, payables managers, cash managers, etc.) and explores payment processing in customers’ organizations.

Payment processing in the context of this survey means initiating a request to pay supplier invoices, payroll expenses and other external and internal financial obligations by check, ACH, WIRE and other electronic or traditional forms of payment — all the way through to the payment execution by your financial institution. The survey takes approximately 25-30 minutes to complete. The results of this survey will be used for determining which business functions are most critical for payments and where Oracle can consider improvements to the existing solutions.

Please complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate people in your organization to complete and submit no later than August 13, 2010. If you require assistance in accessing the survey, please contact julia.baeva@oracle.com.

Is Oracle an Innovative Company?

April 29, 2006 on 5:05 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | 2 Comments |  Print |  Email

Business Week published an interesting special report on The World’s Most Innovative Companies. I was really disappointed not see Oracle on the Top 100 list. That begs a question: is Oracle, especially its application business, an innovative company?

What I found really interesting in the article were some best practice ideas from the best innovators:

• Bring them together Face-to-face teams reduce late-stage conflicts and speed up development times.
• Think traits as well as numbers When evaluating managers, subjective metrics, such as risk tolerance or “imagination and courage” can be a better way.
• Make a seat at the table Pick non-traditional participants for your senior management sessions.
• Preserve oral traditions Hand down tales of company’s long innovation tradition.
• Get involved on the ground A culture of innovation starts from the top.

And even more fascinating was a poll among the respondents on the Enemies of Innovation. Do any of these apply to Oracle? You be the judge.

• Lengthy development times
• Lack of coordination
• Risk-averse culture
• Limited customer insight
• Poor idea selection
• Inadequate measurement tools
• Dearth of ideas
• Marketing or communication failures

No Buzz at the Oracle Applications Day in Seattle

March 13, 2006 on 5:02 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions, Worth Noting | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

I attended the Oracle Applications Day in Seattle today and I can summarize the event in two words: no buzz. I left with a feeling that everyone was tired of the status quo. There isn’t really much to talk about until the Release 12, due in late 2006. Oracle spent a good part of the day reassuring everyone that everything is going according to the plan, and delivering the official message:

• Oracle Fusion is the next application release after Release 12, not a project.

• Oracle Fusion is not a code merge, in contrary to what the competition would have you believe.

• Oracle Fusion is EVOLUTION, not revolution. Customers can choose to upgrade when they are ready.

• Current releases of Oracle, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications will be supported until 2013.

• Oracle will give customers compelling reasons to upgrade before that.

I thought the most exciting presentation of the day was the XML Publisher: Applying Concepts delivered by Tomas Milowski from the Oregon Health and Science University.

Did You Take the Oracle Support Customer Satisfaction Survey?

March 6, 2006 on 3:21 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is another opportunity to provide Oracle with your feedback about their products and services. If you ever submitted an Oracle Support Service Request, you may be asked to complete the Oracle Support Customer Satisfaction Survey. If you received an email with the survey, don’t delete like all other spam, but rather, let Oracle know how they satisfied your needs. You can’t get what you want if you do not ask for it! This survey is being conducted by Satmetrix Systems on behalf of Oracle, and is specific to a single service request.

Oracle Applications Day Continues in Select Cities

February 14, 2006 on 12:13 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

The Oracle Fusion Roadshow is “half-way done”, and continues in select cities as the Oracle Applications Day. Take part in one of the sessions if possible:

• Austin, TX – Thursday, February 16, 2006
• Seattle, WA – Monday, March 13, 2006
• Iselin, NJ -  Tuesday, March 14, 2006
• Toronto, ON – Thursday, April 20, 2006
• Redwood Shores, CA – Friday, April 21, 2006

To get more information and register, visit Application Day. Get involved and find out what’s coming your way! I will see you there!

Oracle To Lay Off About 2,000 Employees

February 12, 2006 on 11:04 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Corp. said last Thursday that it will cut about 2,000 jobs, or more than 3 percent of its work force, as it digs for bigger profits from its recent $5.85 billion takeover of Siebel Systems Inc. Oracle inherited 4,700 Siebel workers in the acquisition, but most of the cuts will be concentrated among employees on the company payroll before the deal closed last week, Chief Executive Larry Ellison told analysts during a conference call. About 90 percent of Siebel’s customer support, engineering and sales staff is being retained, Ellison said.

After the purge is completed, Oracle will employ about 55,000 workers worldwide, according to Safra Catz, Oracle’s chief financial officer. The cost cutting should lower Oracle’s expenses by at least $400 million annually, Catz said.

Read the full story Oracle To Lay Off About 2,000 Employees.

Source: BPM Today.

Oracle Has Its Eyes on Open Source Competitors

February 12, 2006 on 10:56 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Larry Ellison’s open source Fusion by ZDNet‘s Dan Farber — BusinessWeek reported yesterday that three core open source companies–JBoss (middleware), Zend (PHP) and Sleepcat (database) –are in Oracle’s crosshairs. The omnivorous Oracle recently made waves by acquiring InnoDB, an open source storage engine for database competitor MySQL. It’s not surprising. Larry Ellision has said the company would embrace open source (more like bear hug) and make it work [...]

Take Your Time, Oracle Fusion, Take Your Time

January 23, 2006 on 8:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

On the eve of the first anniversary of Oracle’s acquisition of Peoplesoft, Business Week published not one, but three articles on the subject. If you missed them, here are few excerpts. Start with the Oracle Lays Out Its Game Plan story published on January 19, 2005.

“…The Oracle CEO acknowledged that many people are worried he’s trying to make two very different corporate cultures work together – his own, known for it’s pit-bull aggressiveness, and Peoplesoft’s, best known for having a soft touch with customers. It’s a nice story for the press, Ellison says, but it’s not entirely true. “Trust me, Peoplesoft was a very, very aggressive company, or they wouldn’t have lasted in the [corporate software] business as long as they did,” he says.

He reiterated Oracle’s plans to support Peoplesoft’s products until 2013 and said his company will make no effort to nudge Peoplesoft customers toward other Oracle products, such as its database and so-called middleware software that helps big companies use their business systems over the Internet. Many Peoplesoft customers run their business software with other programs made by companies like IBM (IBM ) and BEA Systems (BEAS ). “Unless IBM should go out of business between now and then, that’s just something we can’t control,” Ellison deadpanned.

In the meantime, Oracle engineers are starting work on something dubbed “Project Fusion,” which will merge all three companies’ product lines. Customers, of course, don’t have to buy it. But Ellison believes it will offer strong technological incentive because it will be built entirely on computer programming standards such as Java and hypertext markup language (HTML). That would make the new software easier to manage and easier to connect to other, standards-based programs…”

I believe Oracle deserves benefit of a doubt, and a chance to execute their vision. I also believe they will need to change their behavior to improve their bad reputation of poor customer relationships. As for the rest of us, however, we deserve to be pessimistic. Can you remember roll-outs of Oracle Financials 11i, Oracle CRM or Oracle Order Management? Memories of those releases are still too fresh and painful to be ignored.

According to Oracle, Project Fusion is “Halfway Home”. See the Is Oracle’s Fusion Coming Together? story published on January 20.

… Oracle is not actually merging code of all of the disparate applications; rather, it’s taking the best features and ideas and rewriting the code, based heavily on Oracle’s eBusiness Suite…”…

…Oracle counters the pessimists that it’s giving customers an opportunity to ease into Fusion, by implementing certain features of the new application set in new versions of J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, and Oracle applications coming out this year…

…Meantime, SAP is planning to release a whole new application suite about a year before Fusion is complete, giving would-be clients yet another option. As for Wall Street, many still have the same impression they had a year earlier: It’s a compelling vision that could very well knock SAP on its heels, but it will be tough to pull off….”

I would love to be a fly on the wall during discussions where “best features” get selected from all different Oracle brands and products. If I were an Oracle, Peoplesoft or JD Edwards customer, I would want to make damn sure that my best people are present and heard in all strategy councils, customer advisory boards, and user groups out there.

Anyone who has ever been involved in any ERP implementation before knows how hard it is to make decisions about what and how gets implemented. It is all about making compromises. I am hopeful that Oracle has the right guy to make all interested parties reach consensus. I do not envy John Wookey one bit. I do agree he may have The Hardest Job In Silicon Valley.

… Typical of Wookey’s style was a four-hour meeting with his top staff on Jan. 4. Looking around the conference room, it was hard to tell who was in charge. Wookey didn’t sit at the head of the table, and he let others do most of the talking. As developers argued over arcane technical matters, Wookey weighed in to resolve debates — often by reminding them what customers had asked for…

There is no doubt in my mind there is any confusion at Oracle as to who is in charge. I am sure everybody is aware of who acquired whom. However, the devil is in details. Oracle will be under a lot of pressure to show results quickly. Let’s all hope they take the time to do it right and come up with better products when it’s all over.

Please provide comments or contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.