How Customers Can Prepare for Fusion Applications...

How Customers Can Prepare for Fusion Applications...

While at Collaborate 07 in Las Vegas last month, I happen to attend an incredible session led by my colleage, Nadia Bendjedou, about �What Customers Can Do Today to Prepare for Fusion Applications�. For those of you who didn�t get to attend this or haven�t had a chance to participate in one of her many Webcasts and or Podcasts, I thought I would highlight some of her best practices � Top 10 things to do to prepare for Fusion Applications.

1. Consider Upgrading to the Latest Release of your Applications.

For example, Oracle E-Business Suite - 11i10 or R12, PeopleSoft Enterprise - 8.8, 8.9 or 9.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne - 8.11 or 8.12, Siebel - 7.8, 8.0 applications

2. Rethink your Customization Strategy

a) Is what I put in place still valid and worth keeping?
b) If they are still required, should customers evaluate if there
are better ways of doing/developing these customizations?
c) Should I think about engineering for the future with products
that will survive the upgrade to Fusion? What are those
products?
d) What are the benefits of implementing Fusion technology?

3. Put together a Project Plan to migrate to Fusion

a) Are there areas where you will need to upgrade first?
b) Do I need to evaluate the drivers (business as well as IT)
to upgrade to Fusion Applications?
c) Is there a pilot project for upgrading to Fusion, based on
geography, departmental/functional silos or other reasons?

4. Take advantage of Oracle�s Fusion Architecture and Fusion Middleware

a) How can I evaluate the benefits of Oracle Fusion
Architecture?
b) Does it solve business problems such as security and
compliance, integrating new business flows at lower cost
and or is it just about cleaning and consolidating the
critical data?
c) You can actually use the Fusion Technology today. Go to
www.oracle.com/fusion for more details.

5. Consider Master Data Management

a) Master Data Management (MDM), is a data hub tool that
enables you to synchronize critical data such as
customers, suppliers and products - in a single, accurate,
consistent view of the company�s data, whether from
packaged, legacy or custom applications.
b) You should consider consolidating and cleaning your
critical data about customers, suppliers and products
before going to Fusion.

6. Move to SOA-based Integration

a) Find out from Oracle what they are doing to make their
suite (EBS, PSFT, SEBL and JDE) of applications
SOA-enabled? Are they providing new capabilities in each
product to help them play in a SOA world?
b) Check out Oracle Fusion Middleware � it is a complete
product line - much more than just the application server. It
includes a process orchestration modeling tool BPEL PM,
business activity monitoring (BAM), as well as an
enterprise services bus (ESB). All these tools are known
as the SOA suite and can be used by ALL Oracle
customers today (EBS, PSFT, SEBL, JDE as well as other
point solutions such as Oracle Retail, G-Log etc... ).
c) Consider leveraging Oracle�s Application Integration
Architecture (AIA), which develops a number of Process
Industry Packs to integrate various applications products,
namely SEBL, EBS, G-Log, PSFT etc�. these can be
tailored by customers to fit their applications infrastructure.

7. Extend your Business Intelligence Portfolio

a) Adopt Oracle�s enterprise reporting, publishing & business
intelligence tool (comes with each of our Applications). All
applications have been certified with Fusion BI known as
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition or OBI EE,
which includes XML Publisher (also known as BI Publisher)
b) Start converting your reports to XMLP.Your users will love it! c) Leverage OBI EE as well as XMLP to improve and enhance
your enterprise reporting & analytics today. You will be a
head of the game - these are part of the Fusion Technology.

8. Secure your Global Enterprise by Consolidating

a) Review your custom and legacy applications. You may be
at risk not only to data fragmentations but also to security
fragmentation which could increase your security
vulnerability and security risks.
b) Start consolidating security functions by centralizing
access control (by implementing LDAP and SSO), ensuring
data privacy and enabling compliance for the entire
enterprise.
c) Externalize security functions from the applications (where
it was built by the traditional applications) to a centralized
and professionally managed security infrastructure).
d) Get ahead of the curve by using Oracle�s Fusion Security
(known as the Oracle Identity Management), knowing it is
the security infrastructure for Fusion Applications.

9. Consider Grid Computing

a) Think �Grid� at all levels before going to Fusion. Especially
in a SOA-world where services are independent, well-
defined encapsulations of software functionality that can be
invoked over a network using heterogeneous platforms and
execution environments.
i. Grid computing is about resource allocation,
information sharing & high availability at lower cost.
ii. Resource allocation ensures that all who need or
request resources are getting what they need, that
resources are not standing idle while requests are
going unserviced.
iii. Information sharing makes sure that the users and
applications need is always available.
iv. High availability features guarantee all the data and
computation is always there, just like a utility
company always provides electric power.

10. Centralize your Lifecycle Management

a) Minimize hardware, software and system management
costs by moving to Oracle�s Grid Control, also known as
the Oracle Enterprise Manager - that is the centralized
management tools that help you manage your applications,
database, middleware, operating system, storage and the
network � all from one console.
i. Oracle Enterprise Manager works with most of
Oracle�s applications, using the Applications
Management Packs. These packs reduce efforts to
manage multiple environments, allow faster discovery
and diagnosis of incidents and provide rapid
provisioning and scaling.
b) What is great about the console is that it is the very same
console that will also manage the Fusion Applications.
c) Start with Grid Control today. You will be able to plug in
your first Fusion pilot along side your EBS, PSFT or SEBL
applications as if it were just another application in your
enterprise.
d) Grid Control will be the hub of Oracle Applications Lifecycle
Management.