REDWOOD SHORES, CALIFORNIA—Oracle announced on June 5 a new offering that reduces by as much as 30% the time and cost of migrating from its on-premises applications to its cloud applications.
“It’s now actually an easier upgrade to go from Oracle E-Business Suite to the cloud than from one version of Oracle EBS to another,” said Oracle Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison. “Once you’re in the cloud, that’s the last upgrade you’ll ever do.”
The offering, called Oracle Soar to the Cloud, includes tools that identify existing integrations and customizations in the on-premises Oracle application, scan for configuration parameters and metadata, and use that information to automatically configure an instance of Oracle ERP Cloud, Ellison explained. Additionally, the data in the on-premises application is automatically extracted, transformed, and loaded into the cloud application.
By tapping a sizable library of prebuilt integrations—for example, between Oracle ERP Cloud and a JD Edwards manufacturing application or between Oracle ERP Cloud and a Salesforce.com sales application—Oracle Soar eliminates the need to build such integrations from scratch, he said.
Throughout the application migration, the project team and company leaders can monitor the status via a mobile application, which features a step-by-step implementation guide indicating exactly what needs to be done by whom on each day of the upgrade. In all, companies using Oracle Soar can transition to Oracle Cloud applications in as few as 20 weeks and will have an Oracle customer success manager assigned to the project for a full year after go-live.
Oracle Soar was created for the growing number of companies that no longer question whether they should move to the cloud but still are struggling with how to make the move, said Steve Miranda, Oracle executive vice president of application development.
“In particular with ERP, many companies haven’t updated or upgraded their systems for maybe five or even 10 years, and sometimes even longer,” Miranda said. Those outdated applications, often rife with customizations, make moving to the cloud seem daunting.
But the impetus to move ERP and other core applications to the cloud is growing as businesses look to adopt a range of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, chatbots, and the Internet of Things. Oracle is building its cloud applications with those technologies fully integrated, to address key use cases out of the box.
Oracle also announced last month that it will provide its eligible cloud application customers with Platinum-level support services at no extra cost.
“The speed of change is only going to increase,” Miranda said. “We don’t know what technologies we’ll be talking about two years from now. But Oracle Cloud applications will give businesses the ability to quickly enable whatever comes around the corner, be it technology or business practice. And frankly, they don't have to do anything, because once you've done Oracle Soar and get moved to the cloud, we take care of the updates for you.”
Margaret Harrist is director of content strategy and implementation at Oracle.
