Last year the top question
I was asked was ‘Should I Upgrade or Wait for Fusion?’, and I said “I
am not pushing people to move to Fusion, I really do believe most should
upgrade to R12, but I do always say you need to know all the information to
make the right decision for your organisation.”
In a follow up posting
‘Chicken or Pasta?’
I talked again about the importance of due diligence; but the tide is turning
and there is a new comment I am hearing more and more, “What is the value in
the Upgrade?”
If you have ever attended
one of my presentations were I have discussed this I am very clear, that your
strategy has to be yours, and as long as it is built on knowing all the facts
and you can articulate your decision then that is OK. I openly talk about why
my organisation Fujitsu has stuck on 11i. Our business is to ‘Design, Build and
Run IT systems; design and build are projects and run is a service. Oracle
Project and Service Contracts do not work together well and service contracts
do not process through projects which we use extensively and so we had to
customise the system to suit us. Once the new functionality / ease of support /
technology gain gives us enough additional value we will move.
I suggested last May in
the posting above that Oracle waive the extended support uplift and they did inNovember (I don’t take full credit for that, but I did ask for it).
I always talk about the
value of user groups for learning about the Oracle products and also for their
influence on Oracle. OAUG recently published a survey of 327 customers and the
facts are very scary, 61% had not upgraded to
R12. There have been lots of commentary; Dennis Howlett
is the most thorough. He talks about the threat to Oracle of third party
suppliers and people simply walking away. I have presented on many options;
Upgrade, Re-implement (with or without Business Accelerators), and Migrate to a
shared service. I believe that there are these and more options and it is about
risk, strategy and business needs. Please tell me you know what your
organisation is doing, and if not, then talk to me.
2 comments:
We are upgrading from 12.0.4 first to 12.0.6 - we have a DB upgrade and a platform upgrade we'll need to bite off as well, and with a small IT staff, it's too much to try and tackle making the jump straight to 12.1. We're going to wait to see what comes out in the next year to see where we go from there.
An upgrade strategy is as I say very important, and with the choice you have the database / platform would be my decision also.
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