I had the pleasure of attending the Sunday Symposium of Kscope16 this past weekend. I love love love getting to see former and current co-workers, consultants, clients and Oracle support reps that I’ve had been able to work with for past 15 years. In the Support world, I talk to a LOT of people, MANY times a day. 🙂 Kscope is so cool because it allows me to put a face with those voices!!!
So…you ask…what did you learn? (hang on…good stuff here)
If you look around the industry, there has been a shift from cost & quality, command & control and process & transactional TO management insight, compliance & control, and operational agility. There has been a dramatic shift in the balance between IT and Finance. I’ve been in situations where IT was holding all the cards for upgrades, support, and server maintenance, and Finance wanted to move forward, have the latest and greatest tools. I’ve been skeptical of the whole Cloud thing. Are people really willing to give up that much control over their environments? Well, if you look at the scenario I just talked about, do people have control now? The Cloud is kinda genius, if you think about it. IT doesn’t want to give up their budget for an Exalytics box, or the resources to dedicate to an upgrade of hardware and/or software, so where does that leave the Finance team? Using Planning 2.0 (Oh mercy, let’s hope not)? I would also like to note that I love IT departments with all my heart, so don’t take this personally. PLUS, you have more jobs to do than just supporting the financial software, right?
Insert the CLOUD solution! How many of you remember Fantasy Island? When the plane flew in and Tattoo pointed and said, “The Plane, The Plane”. For some strange reason, that is the image in my head every time someone says Cloud. “The Cloud! The Cloud!”
But, this solution is really genius for those companies that need/want to move forward, but can’t.
Now, I know some of you are siting there thinking, we’ve already spent millions of dollars on our systems, we have 10,000 users, this Cloud stuff is not for us. Well, good news for you….On Prem is NOT going away. Oracle will continue to support it and continue to provide patches for it. It won’t be as often as the Cloud patches, but I promise (and they promised), it’s not going away.
There are also some really neat things coming out in the Cloud solution. I cannot tell you, because I would have to kill you, and because of Safe Harbor. Right now there are handful of Cloud products, but there are more to come! I love that Oracle is now able to offer a solution for many types of customers.
Until next time…..
~Sum
EPMSxSW 