We’re back! UKOUG together 2021 and the Future Direction of Oracle EBS

The UKOUG together 2021 conference was incredibly refreshing! An onsite, face-to-face conference felt like a new beginning for the tech world. Especially when you start Day 1 of the event attending a session by Nadia Bendjedou, Vice President of Product Strategy-Oracle EBS at Oracle. She took us through the strategy of Oracle EBS and the future roadmap. In just one hour, we got a sense that the two years of lockdown gave them a chance to regroup, expand, and put focus on their priorities.

She presented us with 3 routes to the future of Oracle EBS (summed up in my own words):

•UI Modernization with the new Enterprise Control Center and all it has to offer

•The separation of the “EBS infrastructure” from EBS for easier deployment, patching, and back-end maintenance

•Move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and all its operational and performance enhancements

The first main priority has to be the significant effort in introducing the new Enterprise Command Centers to modernize the user experience of EBS. ECC, as they call it, is a kind of managerial dashboard that gives upper-level management a bird’s eye view of the organization. These Command Centers exist for all different modules based on different user roles. And it’s incredible to see them finally focus on what we always used to call UI/web first or end-user first. They took roles in the organization and seem to have tailor-made what data they would like best to analyze and how they would want it presented and created an easy browser-based solution. It was funny to see many customers who have already upgraded, hadn’t used or even seen ECC yet.

I call on the EBS community — if you complain about how EBS looks, then at least try out the newest look and feel enhancements 😉

You can see more about it on Oracle’s website here.

A second focus was on helping people install and patch the Oracle E-Business Suite environments, which has always been a major challenge —as we all know! To this end, they have spent TONS of effort to separate the infrastructure of EBS from the application side to be more like a regular application. You can now upgrade the infrastructure of EBS—meaning, the WebLogic and database version of the actual EBS schema and framework — without needing to update the application level EBS or the customer database or vice versa. This will allow people to use the newest database features for their EBS application while staying on a specific EBS version. Also in this category are the new EBS Family Packs, allowing you to update specific versions of particular modules. This would mean your iProcurement could be of a different version than your iExpense, allowing you to enjoy the features of one module without putting all of your EBS modules into disarray.

Finally, the most eye-opening for Elizabeth and me was the lack of discussion on mobility, automation, or digital assistants. When asked as part of the Q&A, “What is the future roadmap for mobile?” Nadia explained that although they developed many apps for mobile, only a handful was being used — and that those specific apps will continue to be maintained and improved. In contrast, all other ones will remain in maintenance mode. We think this is because Oracle Mobile framework, the technology behind the mobile applications that were used several years ago to build the apps, is now being deprecated by Oracle. So now faced with this crossroads, it seems Oracle is back to the drawing board with regard to EBS mobility. Most of the other digital and mobile features will be included in the SAAS products. However, this (as you all know) is where AuraPlayer shines. We have been helping customers do digital transformations of their Oracle EBS 12.x systems for years.

So for those of you in the EBS community who feel like mobility is still on your priority list, feel free to check out the video library on YouTube.

Or take a look at the “hot off the press” videos for our template apps for E-Business Suite:

•Oracle Time and Labor mobile app

•Oracle Supply Chain mobile app

•Automating PO using OCR for Oracle EBS

We recognized early on that there was a gap for companies looking for digital solutions — so that’s what we did. You can check out more on RPA, Mobility, and Chat on our website.

Day 2 at the conference was filled with additional insights on APEX, ML, security, and other learning opportunities. So while Elizabeth dug deeper into the tech, I was honored to be able to have a one-on-one with Nadia after her morning session “Lift and Shift to the Cloud”. After our chat on ECC and new digital innovations, all I can say is that there are some VERY exciting things to come that were mentioned off the record. So make sure to keep your eye on this blog because she promised that the minute it’s ready for primetime, we’ll be able to release it here!

Throughout our time with Nadia, she said two things that really stood out to us about OCI and Oracle EBS on the Oracle Cloud.

First, in the next five years, she predicted most of the EBS customers will be on OCI because it is the most optimal platform for EBS. Oracle is pushing aggressively for everybody to lift and shift their applications to OCI by providing new features, more optimization, and better deployment strategies.

The second was when she asked a customer that popped over to say hi,” Is your core business to run a data center?” When he replied, “Of course not – we’re a manufacturing organization,” she proceeded to ask him, “Then why are so many of the company’s resources and budget going to manage the IT?” With the real estate to house all the servers, cooling agents, and people to manage it, most companies’ core business is not running a data center. Yet, so many resources— time, energy, and money—are invested in building up that data center.

She pointed out that Oracle’s core business, however, IS running data centers, and that’s why she knows that ultimately they’re going to be incredibly successful. That was food for thought, as many people are hesitant to put their servers in the cloud.

All in all, it was an incredibly successful conference. Kudos to the UKOUG team for delivering such a successful event that we enjoyed. And we hope to be able to have many more live events where we could meet with customers, discuss our modernization solutions, and have a “cheers” — so until next time…