18-19 June 2019

I have to admit to being lazy and not having blogged for sometime! There is nothing like a conference to get me engaged and interested again 🙂 Unfortunately I was only able to attend the first day of the event due to other commitments, but it was still great to catch up with people and listen to the various presentations from Oracle, partners and customers. For those that could not attend, below is my view of the sessions I attended.

Overall Keynote

We were treated to a trio from Oracle to provide the Overall keynote, with Debbie Green first up on stage to give a general introduction, co-existence discussion and obviously talk about SOAR….again!

Next up was Phil Head who followed on from Debbie talking SOAR, moving from on-prem to cloud, and finally digital assistants, machine learning and chatbots.

The final person from the Oracle trio was J J Dekker who talked Applications Unlimited and the investment being made by Oracle, and the fact that although Oracle are a ‘Cloud Company’ they are also ‘Customer First’. He discussed the journey to Cloud, which we have heard many times, along with the acknowledgment that everyone is different and hybrid is the direction of travel for most organisations. He provided an organisation update which showed how the organisation in Oracle for Apps Unlimited is growing considerably, and talked about Oracles investment. He finished with 4 key takeaways, as per the photo below.

E-Business Suite Keynote – Cliff Godwin

After a short interval Cliff Godwin took to the stage for the EBS keynote. I think Cliff always comes across well and shows a good understanding of all things EBS. As per the UKOUG Conference and OpenWorld last year Cliff talked about continuous innovation on 12.2, how the tech and apps are not independent, and how it is now a 10 year rolling notice period – so the latest statement is ‘at least 2030++’ for EBS.

He moved on to discuss DB extended support waiver and the fact that EBS will soon be certified to run on 19c database.

In the last 12 months 12.2.8 has been released and the capabilities of this were highlighted – Enterprise Command Centres, Mobile Release 8, Person Data Removal Tool, HRMS release updates, EBS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, etc. Please see the photos below for more details on these.

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In terms of Enterprise Command Centres, there are now 19 available – up from 6 last year. I have blogged about these before, and they are very powerful – using Endeca and Jet technology to provide data driven navigation. Some of the slides above provide some of the use cases highlighted by Cliff. The fact that these are extensible could prove useful for some customers. Apparently they are well on the way to releasing something for HRMS.

Although Enterprise Command Centres were the primary focus, Cliff also discussed other enhancements in the various functional areas. I was not particularly impressed by anything, and many of the things appeared to be the same as last year….new forms for receiving, shipping and material workbench, MCSA running on Android, iProcurement enhancement, etc etc.

The takeaways Cliff left us with are detailed on one of the above photos, however the most emphasis was placed on ‘Move and Improve’ – moving EBS to Cloud and taking advantage of automation, and Hybrid being the new normal.

Move and Improve you Oracle E-business Suite to Oracle Cloud (OCI): Strategy and Updates – Nadiya Bendjedou

Nadiya had two sessions on day 1, both of which interested me as they were related to EBS and Cloud, which I believe is the direction for many large EBS users for the next 10 years. Nadiya started by talking about how it is important to define what you are referring to when talking about cloud, as it is often misunderstood – IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. I liked her reference to Economy Class v Business Class when referring to IaaS v SaaS!

Move and Improve then followed where she spoke about the EBS you know, own, customised, integrated…..sat on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Reduced Cost, Reduced Risk and Increased Agility were sited as benefits. The deployment options were then discussed and it is important for us all to start thinking about how we can use IaaS – personally I have been using EBS on OCI, as you can spin up a vision instance in next to no time, and then delete it once you are done!

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Use Cases for EBS on cloud followed where what you might consider using OCI for was discussed – whether it be dev\test, DR, backups, reporting, etc. Automation which is one of the key benefits of putting EBS on OCI was something that people really need to be looking at – with cloning a prime example of this. The slides above provide more details.

Old Meets New: Accelerating EBS with OCI – Andy Penver & Shahvaiz Janjua

Following on from Nadiyas session was a partner view from Fujitsu on EBS on OCI from Fujitsu. Although this was a new implementation of EBS using a templated solution, standardised configuration, and set of CEMLI’s. The session discussed the reason for EBS, rather than SaaS, as well as the reason for selecting OCI over on-premise – speed, cost and agility being key.

Andy went on to give the benefits of selecting OCI against other cloud providers.

Shahvaiz took over and moved into the technical elements of the solution where he discussed a number of key points – design, network, design changes, ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’, and finally lessons learnt.

Networking took up a big part of the discussion as this was something which is not straightforward and where a number of issues occurred.

The honest view of OCI was really insightful and I think put Nadiyas previous presentation into perspective – and there is more positives than negatives!

Lessons learnt proved to be on interest to everyone in the room, with lots of questions around how various things were done.

Managing Application Security When Moving to Oracle Cloud – Stephen Davis

An interesting insight from the guys at Q Software on a number of security related areas when it comes to looking at moving to the cloud, as well as some real world scenarios of when things go wrong! They discussed the pros an cons of moving and managing application security.

They quoted recent audit firm studies which were very interesting, and highlighted the application risks that organisations face. Sorry no pics from this!

Extend Oracle E-business Suite with Oracle SaaS Applications: Your Journey to Cloud – Nadiya Bendjedou

This session followed on from Nadiyas session in the morning, with this session concentrating on extending EBS with SaaS, which as I write this I find funny, as we all know EBS can be extended easily….so why look to SaaS….because it really does make sense to do so 🙂

Nadiya started off talking about the importance of understanding the end-state before moving piecemeal, as you really want to negate the need for any temporary integrations and the work involved in this. She then went through lots of use cases where extending EBS with SaaS makes sense. Some of these there were integrations available, and other were conceptual – but in theory totally achievable using the toolsets. The photos below capture many of the use-cases.

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Large Scale EBS 12.2 Upgrade: Licking the Wounds – Mike Salt

Mike Salt from Fujitsu was in the main room on the late slot, but still managed to pull in a reasonable audience for his session on upgrading EBS to 12.2. Mike talked about the reasons for upgrading….

He moved on the discusses the roadmap and the implications of 12.2 essentially being the terminal release and how the tech stack and applications are now independent. He then quickly moved onto the Upgrade and sheer size of the solution that was to be upgrade – move than 91828 distinct logins in a 7 day period. The upgrade path was then discussed…

The upgrade approach in terms of iterations was explained and the importance of each stage….including the dress rehearsal!

There was real value in the gotchas and then the moving goalposts which are important to look out for, as well as tuning post upgrade. Online patching pros and cons were discussed and the impact they can have.

Q&A – Cliff Godwin \ J J Dekker \ Lyle Ekdahl

The day was brought to a close by the trio from Oracle with a Q&A session….

I was disappointed to miss the first day of this event due to customer meetings, but I did manage to make it to the second day and it was a great event. It’s always good to catch up with colleagues and friends old and new as well as listen to whats happening in the wider Oracle ecosystem.

Below I have summarised some of the sessions I attended.

Tomorrows Supply Chain, Today

Richard Jewell, SVP Oracle Applications development led this session and was supported bu Sean Mitchell, Head of Strategy at Wolesley. Richard led most of this session and started off with the number of customers using Supply Chain Cloud products, which i think was around 2300, with many of these joining in the last 12 months. He then spoke about digital supply chain enterprise benefits:

Richard moved on to discuss the various paths that can be taken in order to get to a digital supply chain, and provided some example customers:

Moving on from this he discussed the IOT enabled cloud applications, which was interesting as it is not something i had really thought about before:

He then switched to the Blockchain enabled cloud applications, which again was not really something I personally had thought about in this context (apologies for the blurred photo!):

Richard then invited Sean onto stage and they sat down and discussed where Wolsley are in there journey, what products they are using, what there experience was of Oracle, etc. This was interesting, but as you would expect all very complementary. Sean did highlight his top three things to consider when engaging on an Oracle Cloud project

1. Change Management
2. Extensions and Integrations
3. Service Management

Five Essentail IoT and Blockchain Innovations to Transform Today’s Supply Chain

Simon Nicholson, Senior Director Product Management IoT Cloud was joined by Dr Apurva Kumar Sinha, Head of Innovation and Information management from Network Rail. Simon lead almost the entire session with a small pitch where Apurva discussed what Network Rails business was all about in terms of size and scale.

Simon spoke about the capability gap, in terms of the pace of change and our ability to respond to change.

He moved into the detail of IoT and pointed out various stats from sources around IoT projects that fail or never get out of the Proof of Concept \ Trial phase. However he did highlight that 73% of project that use insights from IoT to improve their business. A slide was then shown which articulated the difference between those project that fail and those that suceed, and i guess no prizes for guessing that concentrating on business outcomes generally results in a higher success rate.

Simon then spoke about the various components that make up a modern supply chain and how the modern supply chain can take advantage of IoT:

Further to this he spoke about eh maturity of the modern supply chain, or lack of it, and also IoT Applications for Industry 4.0, both of which were insightful:

A small discussion on blockchain followed, and how Oracle will soon be releasing Oracle Blockchain Applications Cloud:

In summary simon spoke about the concept of ‘Digital Twin’ which was interesting as was the IT + OT = Aplied IoT.

Morning Anchor Keynote featuring Mark Hurd, CEO, Oracle.

This session was introduced by PWC, unfortunately I missed the start of this due to the queues outside the arena and security advising the arena was full, when in reality there were still lots of seats:

Mark Hurd was up next and gave his usual talk on what he predicted and what has actually happened. Unfortunately Mark was not able to make it to London, so appeared via video link.

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Steve Daheb then had discussions with a few customers, of particular interest was that of AWE who discussed security and how they are utilising the Oracle Cloud. Also interesting was the video around CERN.

Wiggle: A View from a Digital Disruptor

Jeff Wollen, CIO, Wiggle. This was probably my favorite session of the day – I always find a customer presenting alone to be a much more honest view. Jeff was also a great presenter and came across as very personable – he certainly made me want to work for Wiggle! He started off by getting everyone on there feet doing some stretches, before suggesting everyone floss…not many volunteers for that!

Jeff explained about the wiggle business model, ethos, and the journey to get to where they are today which was all very inspiring and interesting. He also discussed how they are now a global operation which is not something I had appreciated before.

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Moving on from where they are and how they got there Jeff moved on to the journey ahead which was insightful for any retail business. He discussed how ‘personalisation on steroids’ – about how the user experience can be revolutionised. Also how valuable the data is and how this could be sold back to suppliers e.g. the stats on where, who, when the buyers are for specific products. The new supply chain models were referring to such as drop ship\direct delivery, VMI, etc.

In summary he spoke about the importance of being brave in business, and finished with a Yoda quote. In response to some questions he did express concerns at the power google and amazon have with voice driven technology and how they have the power to present whatever they want back to the user. Inspirational presentation!

The Thousand Year Decade

Jason Bradbury, The Gadget Show. As you would expect from Jason he made a grand entrance riding a ‘one-wheel’ through the audience and onto the stage! A great talk from Jason around technology including such things as his Delorean, hoverboarding, usign a drone to surf, visiting the Masdar city, VR, and his daughters arthritis and how technology helped. A great speaker and compelling to watch and listen to!

There were lots of other presentation which made a great event, as did all the sponsors and contributors. Eddie Izzard closed a fantastic day!

There has been a big push and lots marketing from Oracle over the past couple of years to get customer onto ‘the cloud’. But now there appears to be the realisation that the cloud is not yet(?) everything to everyone.

A flexible approach is required to accommodate different companies\industries\etc. Realising this, Oracle has suggested several different ‘journeys to the cloud….’ These will suit different companies depending on where they are at as an organisation in terms of IT transformation.

Best of Breed – When I started working with oracle over 18 years ago I was working on a project where we had a ‘best of breed’ solution, as was in-vogue at the time:

• A custom web shop style front end
• Core Oracle 11 EBS (Financials, Inventory, MRP, OM, etc)
• A third party WMS
• Discoverer for reporting

New best of Breed – Interestingly I recently worked on a similar project now with a similar footprint on EBS 12.2.6 and SOA integration to other ‘market leading’ applications

So, is the new best of breed…

• Oracle Cloud ?
• Private Cloud ?
• On-premise ?

And…. How might my project from 17 years ago look today

Pure Oracle?

• Oracle Commerce Cloud
• Oracle ERP Cloud
• Oracle SCM Cloud
• Oracle WMS Cloud

or Hybrid IT?

• Shopify
• Oracle ERP Cloud
• Oracle SCM Cloud
• JDA

Considerations – For me there are a number of important considerations when considering a Hybrid IT Approach:

• Data – sensitivity \ confidentiality \ etc
• Security
• Integration \ Orchestration
• High Availability

Based on the above i guess the first step is to determine if you can actually store your data in the cloud, including such things as what country it is hosted in, where it will be access from ,etc. This lead onto whether your applications can actually be hosted in cloud, or if you need to upgrade.

Security is obviously a key aspect to any corporate application, so you need to understand what security is offered , how it is managed and if this meets your requirements. Following on from security is integration, and in many respects security is a key part of this – consideration needs to be given to data in its various states – rest, motion and use.

If you are running a corporate application then you may have high availability requirements, so this may be a key consideration.

For me most of the above can all be related to integration, as ultimately with any Hybrid solution there will be integration, and and industrialised solution is probably required. From an Oracle perspective SOA Suite (on premise), or SOA Cloud Service (SOACS) could be used, as could Integration Cloud Service (ICS) – depending on where you wanted to manage the integration.

Summary – Hybrid IT is all-encompassing, and it also means something different to everyone. It varies because it is about the right balance of cloud-based and traditional IT services. At the core of hybrid IT is flexibility and the ability to change the balance over time to mirror a specific organisation’s needs.

That’s clearly been a failing of some past IT – where reliability and robustness almost preclude any real flexibility. This is something that hybrid IT can address.

Hybrid IT is cloud and traditional IT. It’s what your IT department looks after and what you’ve outsourced. It’s on-premise and off-premise. It’s the technology you know you have and it’s shadow IT – including the cloud services your business units buy directly.

You may have read in my first blog post about how Cliff Godwin and
Muhannad Obeidat talked about Enterprise Command Centres (ECC) at this years UKOUG. They certainly demo well, so I thought it worthwhile doing a little research to understand capabilities and see what they offer an eBS user.

With no real operational reporting since Discoverer (unless you count BI Publisher\XML Publisher), it appears that Oracle are investing in eBS reporting and data discovery with this latest product. This of course is not the first time, we had Daily Business Intelligence previously, which was very limited in its scope. Oracle have committed to investment in ECC’s with a further 6 functional areas being released next calendar year.

What are ECC’s? Essentially they offer users a series of dashboards that come out of the box, and allow ‘information driven navigation’, or as most of us would call it drill-down! Every time you click on a graph, link, or filter the data on the dashboard is refreshed to reflect the selection. Oracle label this as ‘conversation with the data’, which I think is a nice way of putting it, and it really does work and is intuitive to use. You can drill down all the way to the transaction level and the eBS form will open. ECC’s also inherit eBS security and therefore you do not need to worry about this.

Some of the functionality current available includes:

• Searching
• Data Visualisation
  • Summarisation Bar
  • Lots of different Charts \ Graphs
  • Tag Cloud (which are cool!)
  • Results Tables

Installation – The installation instructions are available on My Oracle Support note ID 2409163.1. It is interesting to see the resource requirements on this, for example if you have 15 data sets with 2 million records each and 50 named users, then you would need a minimum of 2 cores, 32gb of memory, and 80gb disk space. They also reccomend this sits on a standalone server, although it can use the apps tier for eBS.

Once installed and configured, there is a series of concurrent programs to load data into the ECC’s, which similar to a BI ETL has to be run in full mode first, followed by being scheduled for incremental loads. Finally you can grant the ECC roles to specific users who you want to access them.

Availability – ECC’s are available at no additional cost to licensed users of the owning Oracle eBS applications. They can be applied to Release 12.2.4 and higher. The following command centers are currently available:

• Oracle Assets Command Center
• Oracle Payables Command Center
• Oracle Receivables Command Center
• Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Command Center
• Oracle Inventory Management Command Center
• Order Management Command Center

Oracle advised at UKOUG Apps 18, that they had 6 new dashboards that would come along next calendar year, along with continued enhancements. Hopefully they will also provide the tooling for customer to do extensions to these themselves.

Having been on the committee for this years conference I thought a good place to start blogging would be about the 2018 conference for UKOUG.  Being relatively new to the committee I found it interesting and rewarding to give something back to the community. Having been attending OUG events for many years, I would recommend you become a volunteer.

Moving onto the event itself on a cold rainy day I found myself at the ACC in Liverpool.  The welcome from the staff was warm and friendly as they directed people to the registration desks which were on the lower ground floor in the main exhibition space.  it was relatively quiet at 9am, but I guess it always is on the opening day.  I will give a summary of some of the sessions I attended, but please visit the UK OUG website where you can find the slides for the presentations.

MONDAY

Welcome and Oracle UK Update – enjoyable intro from John Abel, even if not a lot of content!

Microservices in a Monolith World – Interesting session from Phil Wilkins from Cap Gemini, discussing how we might look to move away from long-terms investments to container based solutions. He discussed approaches to gradual transition to microservices.

Chatbots Best Practices & Design Patterns – Ruben Rodriguez explained how to create a bot with different use-cases. Something I have no prior experience of, so it was interesting to understand the concepts and how these are deployed. Talking about design patterns, intent, entity driven, etc.

Oracle E-Business Suite Update, Strategy & Roadmap – Cliff Godwin continued with his session from Open World earlier in the year. I always enjoy listening to Cliff, and believe he comes across well. Much of this session was around the continuous innovation and premier support of E-Business Suite until at least 2030, and 12.2 being the terminal release. Slides were presented around some of the key enhancements to EBS, including the Enterprise Command Centres – more of which next….

Empowering E-Business Suite User Experience: Data Discovery & Visualisation – Muhannad Obeidat followed up on Cliff Godwin’s sessions with an interesting insight into the Enterprise Command Centres, which appear to be the primary area of investment in EBS at the moment. They look like they sit on Endeca technology with lots of drill down through data to get to transaction level. They look powerful, although at present they are limited to 6 modules. A data sheet is here http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/ebs-enterprise-command-center-brief-5108750.pdf

Leveraging the Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG) – This was a joint session with myself and colleague Ian Scorrer discussing a recent implementation of ISG for a large supply chain and logistics organisation in the UK. Hopefully the audience enjoyed the session and got something out of it!

Networking! – It’s always good to catch up with friends, colleagues and customers past and present over a beer or two 🙂

TUESDAY

Cloud to On-Premise ERP Integration with Autonomous Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) – Niall Commiskey was his usual entertaining self for this session on OIC! With a couple of PowerPoints to introduce the topic, he dived straight into a demo which was informative and enjoyable.

Goodbye, old Friend – Transitioning from a Forms System to an APEX Application – Jamie Hepburn gave some real world stories around moving to APEX forms. A good session which discussed various approaches, gotchas, and lessons learnt.

An Post – OBIEE Migration to OAC and ADWC – David Heraty and Tony Cassidy talked us through An Posts journey through various products to get to OBIEE and then OAC. It was interesting session, and Tony sure likes to talk 🙂

WEDNESDAY

And out of Chaos Came the Perfect APEX Application – Alex Nuijten is a great presenter and has an abundance of knowledge to share, so was great to sit in on this session first thing on Wednesday. It was good to understand his views, and lessons learnt – not just in developing APEX, but also the initial design best practice and how to make it easy to maintain and support.

A Methodology for Migrating Oracle Forms Applications to Oracle JET – Mark Waite for me was one of the best presenters over the 3 days! I knew very little about JET prior to attending this session, but this was a real story about migrating from good old oracle forms to JET. The presentation was centred on the Isle of Man government payment system, which was written many years ago in oracle forms and which they wanted to extend the life off by moving to a new technology. It was good to see old v new, as well as lessons learnt, rationale, challenges, etc.

Top 10 Ways to Make Oracle E-Business Great Again – I was intrigued by this session to see what Mark Vivians top 10 was going to be. Needless to say there was no surprises or nothing particularly ground breaking. Topics covered included moving EBS to cloud infrastructure, using mobile, 3rd party tools for changing charts of accounts, AP invoice automation, Advanced Collections, Enterprise Command Centres, etc.

Life in the Cloud, a User Experience of Support and Upgrades – I found this another highlight of the 3 days with Kevin Osborne from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) talking about experiences of implementing and living with Oracle Cloud. He explained the issues of quarterly updates and enhancements as well as the importance of having a good Oracle Customer Success Manager working with you.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton