Keeping EBS in focus at Oracle AI World 2025

My blog last week about AI World concentrated on cloud applications and the technology beneath them, but what about on-premises applications like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS)?

You may think there's nothing at Oracle AI World for EBS customers, but each year we’re impressed by the number of them at the event. Companies that aren’t ready to move yet but want to keep an eye on what Oracle is doing. And they’re keen to know what’s next for EBS.

Advance your EBS: Inoapps live Q&A with Oracle

Last year we held a Q&A roundtable for EBS customers with Nadia Bendjedou VP EBS, which was a real hit. This year we did the same with Cliff Godwin, SVP EBS. We had a bigger room, and we filled it. I had a list of questions to ask but didn't need to use it as the conversation flowed for the whole 90 minutes.

Here’s a summary of the questions asked, and topics covered during the session.

Security first: who owns it and how to strengthen it

The first questions were about security. Particularly, concerns about a recent EBS security patch, released not long after the previous patch. Cliff responded that, while Oracle provides best practice, with on-premises applications, there’s a lot of variances with how organizations configure their components. He gave an example of a parameter—allowed resources—which Oracle had previously tied down for security. However, this caused problems for other organizations, so Oracle had to revert to leaving this as a customer responsibility.

At Inoapps, our team works with our clients to limit their exposure to these kinds of incidents, proactively alerting them to any attempted rogue access while always encouraging them to maintain the latest security patch release state. That said, our evenings and weekends were impacted in the same way as many other EBS users were, so there are lessons to be learnt all round! Perhaps we will write another blog on our collective experience.

Attendees then wanted to know if moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) would remove these security concerns. Cliff said that while better security can be expected, the instance and its security remains in the hands of the organization. He recommended that everybody read this whitepaper.

Take a look, and if you’d like help with the security review, please get in contact with Inoapps.

Patching realities: balancing downtime with always-on

Security patching led to patching in general. Manufacturers at the table expressed concern that technical patching still requires downtime, which isn’t conducive to their 24/7 environments. Cliff informed us that Oracle is working on how this can be avoided, but this is still in progress and may only be available on cloud or Exadata.

Decoupling the stack: a new approach to EBS upgrades

Cliff told us how Oracle has now decoupled the applications and technology stacks so they can be upgraded independently. They are planning a tech stack refresh in 18 to 24 months. Traditionally a major release includes a new tech platform, and as this will now be avoided, there won’t be an EBS release 13.

My fellow ACE Director, Mia Urman of AuraPlayer, asked if this tech update would include Forms 14, and Cliff confirmed it would.

What’s new in 12.2.15: scenario-based costing

Cliff announced that release 12.2.15 was imminent, happening a few days later. You can find the details here. The release contains lots of enhancements, all user-driven with no particular theme, and you don’t need to upgrade the whole app if you don’t want to, just the family pack.

There are big enhancements in cost management included. Of particular interest to the manufacturing companies around the table, he explained that the previous under-utilized cloud version has been rewritten for EBS and Enterprise Command Centers (ECC). The module looks at variances in a scenario-driven approach, which you can then decide to adopt by products or manufacturing process. Very helpful when deciding on your sourcing strategy, as the ability to simulate scenarios reveals potential impact on your margins. There’s no additional cost for this functionality if you have the module, but ECC needs to be implemented for the dashboards. This wasn't specifically developed for tariffs, but it’s timely.

Ask EBS and the AI Question

We spoke a bit about Ask EBS and the ability to use the Select AI service with EBS. I shared my personal view that if AI is driving your corporate strategy, it may be time to move to Fusion Apps where AI is embedded and easier to be adopted and created by the business.

For those adopting Ask EBS, consider that as the setup includes creating a new schema utilizing the ECC architecture, this is a good opportunity to install ECC at the same time.

Along with the Oracle approach, Ask EBS, there is more you can do to adopt Oracle AI Services with your EBS and we have a webinar in January that explores this further.

Oracle also gave focus to EBS

Mia and I then had a Birds of a Feather session in the main AI World event on modernizing EBS. In the session, we looked at my roadmapping flow chart, followed by lively discussion. I’d sum it up with: organizations have roadmaps as unique as themselves.

I’d created a survey for the Inoapps sessions and had these attendees complete it too.

What EBS customers are saying: take the survey

The survey I created for the sessions has given us great insight into what EBS organizations are doing.

We’re keeping it open till late December, so if you’d like to better understand the market and what your peers are doing, take the survey and we’ll send you the report and follow it up with a webinar.