Should I upgrade to R12 or wait for Fusion

I attended Debra Lilley’s presentation on Fusion at a recent Financials SIG (UKOUG). She’s an enthusiastic speaker with lots of knowledge and her presentation was very well received.

Debra gave an inspiring insight into Fusion which made me feel proud to be an Oracle Partner. Here are my takeaways:

• Fusion will be to the next generation what instant messaging and windows GUI was to the character based generation.
• Fusion will work in many layers and will allow you to add in other applications, in fact…
• Fusion will work with any other applications (so long as they are open source). This happens in the middleware layer which will be complete, open and integrated.
• The data model as used in R12 is a preview of the Fusion data model. The data model comes from R12 for EBS and Siebel for CRM.
• BI Publisher is excellent and will be firmly in Fusion. We should get started in adopting and becoming proficient in BI Publisher now (see also Dr Bendjedou’s comments below).
• EBS and Hyperion will come together so that EBS will processes the transactions and Essbase will hold the balances.
• Moreover OBIEE will give very efficient queries of real time information by combining yesterday’s optimised warehoused data (Essbase) with today’s OLTP EBS data. (How cool is that!)
• There might be some light blue in the screens (and there might not be too). When Debra spoke about what she saw she made me think that EBS Fusion will look like the Oracle Smart space screen shots from Thomas Kurian’s article (see below).

In answering the question as to whether to upgrade to R12 or wait for Fusion, my understanding of the argument is that you may not wish to upgrade if you:

• don’t need the additional functionality from R12 (see http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/10/06/oracle-slides-overview-of-r12-financials-architecture/ )and
• c an wait for many years on 11.5.10 with extended support (see http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/07/16/oracle-waives-extended-support-fees-for-one-year/ )

See more discussion on this and many other good Fusion articles on Debra’s blog here:

http://debrasoracle.blogspot.com/2009/09/should-i-upgrade-to-r12-or-should-i.html

Debra also mentioned Dr Nadia Bendjedou’s paper on “Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Fusion Apps”. You can get the white paper here (PDF)

http://scp.oaug.org/file/10ThingsToPrepareForFusion1210005792.pdf

and the slide show here

http://www.oracle.com/applications/evolutionary-path-to-fusion.pdf

Two things that struck me from Nadia’s slides were.

1. She uses “inventory” as a verb!
2. She suggests that in the next year you should focus on tactical projects and quick wins e.g. implement and become proficient at BI Publisher.

Pictures from Thomas Kurian’s article (http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/downloadMedia.asp?MediaDetailsID=227)

Oracle Smart space (p.26):

Office plug in (p.27):

This entry was posted on 12/10/2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under 11i to R12 Upgrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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