Oracle E-Business Suite: Trends & Misconceptions

I recently attended the Ascend user conference—the  home of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). I listened not only to the strategy updates from Cliff Godwin and Nadia Bendjedou, but also to the many customers I spoke to, either formally in meetings or just in the corridor.

I was surprised at how many customers were in a state of inertia—mainly because they still believe Oracle is phasing out EBS. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, when Inoapps acquired an EBS Managed Service partner.

I think that now that Oracle use the term ‘rolling 10-year support date,’ the message that there is no plan to decommission EBS is starting to permeate.

So since EBS is here for a while, organizations should understand there’s no need to simply stand still. There’s lots that EBS can do for your business today.

But first, let us check out the hygiene factors. Where should your application be?

Application

• The latest version is EBS 12.2.13, released Nov 2023 
• For EBS, the latest ‘must do’ was to be above 12.2.7 by 1st July 
• 12.2.7 onwards is currently supported till 2035 but this is a rolling date, there is no plan to sunset EBS

These points are still causing confusion in the customer base.

I suspect there’s still a sense that Oracle ‘will just keep it going until everyone has moved’ rather than ‘this is a living growing application where my investment is still safe’ thought process. This means that many organizations are simply sweating the asset rather than trying to get more from it or use it to solve their business challenges.

Database

• Although 19c premier support ended in May 2024 and is now in extended support till Apr 2027, the additional cost has been waived 
• The latest database 23AI is NOT supported yet for EBS
• Autonomous database is only certified in a very specific scenario (we have one customer waiting for this)
• The latest database for EBS is 19.23, so if you are on an earlier 19.xx, consider patching

Whilst these hygiene factors are very important, the confusion and misinterpretation I see and hear means that many organizations are not looking at the innovation Oracle has been delivering. I want to concentrate the rest of this blog on the one of their biggest investments:

Enterprise Command Centers (ECC)

Most EBS customers have heard of ECC, but again there is confusion. Many think it is simply an Oracle reporting solution.

Oracle EBS has always been a great repository for data from transactional processes. However there are times when extracting that data has been a challenge. Over the life of EBS, a whole ecosystem of partners has created point solutions for reporting against EBS. Most organizations would have invested in one of these, and so, believing that Oracle is late to the game, have no appetite to adopt something new in what they see as a dying system.

ECC is not a reporting solution that will replace what you are doing today. It is not here to create your month-end reporting that goes to the C-suite or goes out to your customers.

ECC is a series of operational dashboards that enable you to drill into your data and understand business scenarios that your operational team work with each day. ECC helps you answer questions that are only revealed as you start to delve into your data. If you’re the payables clerk and you're finding it difficult to reconcile at month end, it's easy to spot a figure that might look incorrect. But when you drill down, do you need to drill down by cost center, or by region, or by supplier? ECC allows you to do this.

ECC uses the power of Oracle’s in-memory database capabilities. You run a job as frequently as it works for your organization, which generates this powerful view of your data and then the dashboards work against the generated view. It doesn't happen inside your operational database. It happens to one side, but you see it inside EBS.

There were two common issues I heard about ECC in those Ascend discussions. Some customers think OCI could be used for ECC and used as a first step to cloud. However performance-wise, the ECC repository needs to be physically close to your EBS installation so that it picks up that data quickly in the dashboard. OCI is a great place to host ECC if your EBS is also hosted there. But if your EBS is in your own data center, then that’s where you should host your ECC, even if it’s on a separate physical server.

The other common challenge I heard was that ECC only runs on Linux while EBS is using something else. It’s true that ECC only runs on Linux, but it doesn't matter if your EBS runs on something like Solaris. They are separate instances and it’s therefore possible to have that kind of hybrid combination.

Another unknown gem within ECC is that you can extend it to include your customizations. It isn’t limited purely to the out-of-the-box EBS.

So you can see, there’s real business value being delivered for your EBS. If you haven't yet explored ECC, reach out,  we would love to discuss it with you!

And if you’d like to know more, listen to this webinar from our team that talks about ECC and extending its capabilities.