Wednesday 14 March 2012

Upgrade or Fusion? replaced by What is the value in the Upgrade?




Last year the top question I was asked was ‘Should I Upgrade or Wait for Fusion?’,    and I saidI 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:

Unknown said...

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.

Debra Lilley said...

An upgrade strategy is as I say very important, and with the choice you have the database / platform would be my decision also.