By Brandon Teoh
The Oracle Cloud is an offering which provides infrastructure, platform and applications with built-in social media features. In short, it is IaaS+PaaS+SaaS+Social+Media all in one bundle.
It is also the only Cloud offering in the world to provide deployment options in terms of private cloud, managed cloud or hybrid cloud. In his keynote, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation said that deployment of private cloud means that customers can put Oracle products inside their own premises, protected by own Firewalls but on the other hand, Oracle is the one who owns these products (software and hardware) and will also be responsible to maintain the support it.
The application stack consists of the following modules.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – integrated with SRM
- Planning and Budgeting
- Human Capital Management (HCM)
- Talent Management
- Oracle and SelectMinds
- Sales and Marketing – integrated with SRM
- Customer Service and Support
- Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM)
The Oracle Social Relationship Management provides social media capabilities in three main areas:
- Social collaboration
- Social Marketing
- Social Engagement and Monitoring
It is hence useful to enable companies to listen, engage, create, market, and analyze interactions across multiple social platforms in real-time providing a holistic view of the consumer. Besides that, it is also directly integrated with the ERP and HCM application which allows organization to use social to transform their corporate business processes and systems.
CEO Larry Ellison mentioned that the Oracle Cloud was created to support existing customers who have expressed desires to adopt cloud to combat IT adoption challenges such as declining IT budgets, IT-alignment issue and dynamism of IT KPIs. This suggests that the Oracle Cloud is meant to be competition friendly because its primary target is Oracle’s existing customers.
These customers are encouraged to plug in and out as when they see fit. This is indeed the practice of Software-as-a-Service which charges customers based on pay-per-use but do not lock-in customers for software maintenance fee – it is give and take.
Fusion
Do not get confused by Oracle Cloud and Oracle Fusion Application. The latter is referring to an initiative (which is still undergoing) in which all applications such as the ERP, HCM and etc are being developed using Java programming language on top of a common framework known as the Oracle Fusion Middleware which runs on Oracle database. Up to date, applications which are considered to be Fusion Applications are financial management, human capital management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, procurement, governance, and project portfolio management – some of which also available under the Oracle Cloud.
Oracle Fusion Applications were announced shortly after Oracle’s US$18 billion acquisition spree of Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel Systems in 2005. It is very much a software engineering initiative which aims to integrate applications into a common platform. Roger Li, SVP, Technology Business Unit, APAC mentioned that Oracle has invested billions of dollar into this exercise and is still on-going.
Pricing
One issue with cloud Software-as-a-Service model is the inevitability of making available product pricing online.
Pay attention to the global pricing of Oracle Cloud applications which are published online in which Human Resources module under Human Capital Management application is priced at US $9.50 / employee/month while Talent Management module is priced at from US $1.50 / user/month. For Sales and Marketing application, it is being priced at from US $100 / user/month for standard edition, from US $140 / user/month for enterprise edition and from US $200 / user/month for premium edition.
Unintentionally, Oracle has mandated that competitors should also price their cloud products within similar price range – unless some competitors are willing to sell at a much higher price than Oracle Cloud’s offerings. Nonetheless, Oracle hasn’t yet published all pricing for its application services of Oracle Cloud such as the ERP application and planning & budgeting application.
Oracle Fusion CRM is also not available under the Oracle Cloud bundle. Microsoft dynamics CRM online is priced at US $ 44/user/month while SalesForce.com’s Sales Cloud (Sales automation & CRM) is priced at US $ 5/user/month for contact manager edition, US $ 15/user/month for group edition, US $ 65/user/month for professional edition, US $ 125/user/month for enterprise edition and US $ 250 /user/month for unlimited edition.
Therefore, by comparing Oracle Cloud’s Sales and Marketing Application with SalesForce.com’s Sales Cloud, it shows that both are offering within the same price range between US $ 200 to 250 /user/month, which is equivalent to RM 700 to RM 875 /user/month.
Practicality
Imaging that a private company like Public Bank who employs about 2500 sales persons, it will need to invest a significant amount of money to enable all its sales persons to be empowered with such sales automation software overnight. Nevertheless, this is usually not the case when it comes to real life scenario. According to Dough Hughes, VP, Applications Production management, Oracle Corporation, Japan & APAC, Oracle envisions that departments within organizations will make own decisions of adopting cloud software by having own budgets and not to wait for top down corporate IT direction.
The Oracle Cloud should be seen a way for organization to empower its employees by not adopting the rip and replace strategy but that of the plug and play one. Oracle Cloud Applications’ reporting capability is also enhanced with built-in business intelligence features to enable business analytics.
