There are some things you can do to protect your applications investments. See Oracle’s presentation  for a complete listing. But, I can tell you that one thing stands out. You should upgrade to the minimum release required to allow direct migration to Fusion Applications.

This means that the following releases are recommended:

1. E-Business Suite 11i.10, R12 and beyond
2. PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8, 8.9, 9.0 and beyond
3. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11, 8.12 and beyond
4. JD Edwards World A7.3, A8.1, A9.1 and beyond
5. Siebel 8.0 and beyond

Being on these releases will not only ensure that you are capable of upgrading to Fusion Applications in the future, but it will also enable you to take advantage of new products that are continuously being certified against these versions.

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle’s Applications Unlimited strategy complements the Fusion Applications. This means that you can conceivably stay on your current ERP platform without having to upgrade to Fusion Applications. Oracle categorizes three stages of lifetime support for Applications Unlimited. I will summarize the features and benefits of each, as described by Oracle on their site (http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html), and then explain why I do not recommend allowing your organization to remain at the third level of support.

1) Premier Support – provides you with maintenance and support of your Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications for five years from their general availability date.

2) Extended Support – allows you stay competitive, with the freedom to upgrade on your own timetable. It provides you with an extra three years of support for specific Oracle releases for an additional fee. You benefit from the same quality of service you receive with Premier Support, with the security of knowing you can expand your systems when the time is right.

3) Sustaining Support – puts you in control of your upgrade strategy. With Sustaining Support, you will receive technical support for as long as you operate your systems – which includes access to Oracle’s online support tools, knowledgebases, pre-existing fixes for your solution, and assistance from technical experts.

My recommendation is not to remain in the Sustaining Support mode, because no new bugs will be accepted at this level. This negates your ability to be in control of your upgrade strategy based on business requirements, because, should a new issue arise, the standard advice will be to upgrade.

In my next entry, I will provide practical recommendations about what you should do about all of this now.

To facilitate the best of breed approach to Fusion Applications, Oracle consolidates the foundation components for each of the products in its portfolio (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) in the suite’s technology stack.

Oracle has been doing this in a 2-step process. At one level, it is pulling more products under the Fusion Middleware umbrella. Fusion Middleware has expanded from a Web server to a rich suite of products including Application Server, Identity management, Security, Business Intelligence and Application Integration Architecture.

At the next level, Oracle has been upgrading the technology stack of the application products in the portfolio so that as many products from the Fusion Middleware suite can be utilized as possible.

For example, XML Publisher, the reporting framework from the Fusion Middleware Suite of products, has been certified to work with PeopleSoft 8.48 and is seamlessly integrated with version 9.0. This means when customers use PeopleSoft version 9.0, they are ready for Fusion Applications.

The same approach is used for several of the products in Fusion Middleware suite, such as Single Sign-on solutions, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Formerly Siebel Analytics), which has been certified to work with E-Business suite.

The Fusion Applications will work on the same set of Fusion Middleware components. So you can protect your investment and reduce some upgrade-related headaches in the future by ensuring that your environment is running at least at the minimum level required to take advantage of the direct upgrade path to Fusion Applications.

In my next entry, I will discuss the available support options for Oracle Fusion.

Fusion Applications is still in the works and there is no date announced for availability. Oracle’s vision for Fusion Applications is to create an application suite that unifies best-of-business capabilities from all Oracle Applications in a complete suite. This means, for example, it could be an amalgamation of strong HR functionality from PeopleSoft paired with core Financials from E-Business Suite.

It is less clear how it will play out in practice. It could be a totally new suite of applications, apart from E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. Another scenario is that the solution could enable you to pick and choose the modules you want to install and those modules may come from multiple, pre-existing Oracle product families. For example, in a single instance, you could select PeopleSoft HR and E-Business Suite financials with the underlying technology stack at the database and Application Server level supporting such a configuration.

Complementing the Fusion Applications is Oracle’s Applications Unlimited strategy. I’ll cover that in my next entry.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is available now. It is a loose collection of middleware infrastructure tools and components centering around Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Application Integration, Web Server, Collaboration Suite, etc. When it comes to licensing, you may have to license each one independently. A complete listing of middleware products can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html.

If you are going to use any of these products, you should verify the certification matrix to ensure the product combination is certified. For example, Oracle 10g Application Server is not certified with 11.5.10.2 E-Business Suite. If you want to take advantage of all that 10g AS has to offer in your E-Business Suite environment, you need to upgrade your E-Business Suite environment to R12.

My next entry will be about Fusion Applications.

With its continuous spree of acquisitions and increasingly complex array of solutions, the Oracle branding strategy is not getting any easier to follow.

It’s a throwback to the time when Oracle struggled with branding the middleware platform. First it was called Web Application Server (WAS), then Internet Application Server (iAS). Finally, a longer term strategy was put into place with 9iAS and 10gAS.

Coming back to the source of the confusion with Fusion, Oracle, in all its wisdom, has chosen the same name for its Applications and Middleware suites of products. I will talk about each of them in upcoming entries, starting with Fusion Middleware.

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary last week. That’s 10 action-packed orbits around the sun! In actual fact, we passed this milestone on February 28, 2008, but wanted to have the celebration in a month that offered better weather than is typical in late February in Chicago.

Over 300 people joined us on June 4 at the Adler Planetarium for an evening of networking, dancing and good cheer. The Galileo Room was filled to capacity with clients, partners, vendors – and our wonderful and talented employees and their spouses. The energy in the room was truly amazing.

A link to the video we developed for the event appears at the end of this entry. Whether you know Synch well or not, it provides a good way to gain a deepened sense of who we are as a company, and what we stand for.

Follow this link to our “Elevating Value” video. Follow this link to our 10th anniversary celebration picture gallery.

“Unified” organizations bring it all together.  Their needs for integration of data across business units and standardization of processes are both high.  Dow Chemical is an example used by the Enterprise Architecture as Strategy authors.  Dow cross-sells products within regions, so it needs excellent data integration, and it sells the same products, via standardized processes, in more than 175 countries around the world.  Sixty percent of Dow’s work processes are standardized and five of its eight global processes are housed in a shared-services organization.  Dow has achieved enormous bottom-line efficiencies by focusing on both data integration and process standardization…as well as shared services!

Of course there are hybrid situations as well.  Some companies employ one model for certain functions and another for others.  Once you’ve established where you fit in, or where you should fit in from the standpoint of your operating model, defining process and IT strategies becomes much easier. 

We would like to hear your thoughts and ideas.  It could be interesting to discuss some more examples of where public and private sector organizations fit in, and why.  Where does your organization fit into the MIT framework?  What about companies like Wal-Mart and Dell?  And what about public sector organizations?  How about universities?  Or utility companies?

The “Replication” model on the lower right is for organizations whose success depends on efficient and repeatable processes, but not on shared customer relationships. McDonald’s and other franchise operations are clear examples of this type of organization. Repeat the process meticulously and make sure that the experience is consistent at each company outlet and you’ve got a winning formula for success!

TD Bankworth, also described in the Enterprise Architecture as Strategy book, represents a financial services organization that found a Replication framework to best support its growth strategy. The organization transitioned from a Diversification to a Replication model because the latter enabled it to make efficient and effective acquisitions, and to get new branches up and running quickly.

Stay tuned for the next post, and last in this series, which covers the Unification Model.

Organizations that require high levels of data integration across business units, but low levels of business process standardization, are in the upper left quadrant. They share data because their business units share customers, products, suppliers, or partners, or some combination thereof. Data integration improves efficiencies, as well as the overall customer experience at each organizational touch point. No matter where customers tap into the organization, local representatives know who they are, what they buy, and many other defining characteristics – because they’ve got the data!

Process standardization is low because it would wash out the uniqueness of each service operation and commoditize the customer experience…not to mention that standardization may be impossible because different products may require different processes! Low cost, which is one of the benefits of standardized processes, is usually not a primary driver of strategy for these organizations.

As highlighted in Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, large financial services institutions such as Merrill Lynch (Global Private Client) and MetLife benefit from “Coordination” because they can integrate multitudes of products and processes without forcing standardization. They have an integrated view of customers and can interact with them via processes that fit for each product, service and business unit.

Stay tuned for the next entry, which covers the Replication Model.