The evolution of the Oracle SaaS extension

As part of the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Customer Success Webcast series, our customer Pence Construction has twice shared how they’ve extended their Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications (SaaS) using the co-existence OIC facilitates.

The first looked at using OIC and APEX to enable faster, more efficient process automation.

This time, we drilled into a new SaaS extension that further extends their solution using OIC and Visual Builder to solve an intercompany problem.

You may wonder why they made a different choice this time (hint: it has to do with technology evolution).

The evolution of extending

First there was the customization, traditionally done with on-premise applications like E-Business Suite (EBS). You can add whatever you want, but upgrades are risky. The vendor changes something and you lose your customization. Or the application fails entirely.

So co-existence became more popular. Applications were already being integrated, so why not build your additional functionality in the same way?

A seminal moment came with the Oracle whitepaper: Extending Oracle E-Business Suite using Oracle APEX. Thereafter, APEX was treated seriously for extending enterprise applications.

Today many organizations on the road to cloud are slowly replacing their on-premise customizations with APEX extensions. These days, you can even embed an APEX screen into EBS itself.

Along came SaaS. Initially the story was you couldn’t extend SaaS beyond in-built components, and configuration was your only tool. As organizations with more complex needs took it up, co-existence again became the answer.

But what to use? First stop was Application Development Framework (ADF), originally used to build Oracle SaaS. I worked on an early proof of concept (POC) with Oracle and fellow ACE Directors. It worked, but it wasn’t simple or cost-effective.

Then Oracle started to develop in Visual Builder, to meet the challenge of different devices. Our POC for this had similar results.

But organizations had pressing needs. What about APEX, if it worked for EBS? So APEX became the development tool of choice for extensions.

At Inoapps, we developed customer solutions like the one for Pence along with the Inoapps product portfolio in APEX.

Meanwhile, Visual Builder was maturing, and today we see it in Oracle Redwood. More than just the branding and UI—the whole user experience. It’s also the technology Oracle uses to embed their AI in SaaS.

In the Redwood rollout, Oracle allowed organizations to edit screens—to add or hide non mandatory fields and change appearance. They were using Visual Builder, even if they didn’t know it.

This gave two options for Visual Builder: controlled editing within SaaS, and building new applications in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Visual Builder gives you the same UI as SaaS but APEX has a Redwood theme and at Inoapps our APEX product portfolio have adopted this.

Extending is external, right?

Here’s a diagram from a presentation I participated in with Jeff Price, VP Applications Development at Oracle Cloud World in 2022 and 2023, where they introduced the option to create a Visual Builder new page or even application within your SaaS.

The second option in this diagram means your extension is part of your SaaS—secured and managed within your application, and without OCI costs. There are rules and limitations, but it’s a serious option for extensions.

Visual Builder, like all new technology, has taken time to mature, but with cloud’s frequent releases come fast improvements.

When Pence Construction had their latest requirement, they wanted to extend a SaaS process. So they used this existing SaaS functionality to create custom objects and used OIC to populate these with both data from SaaS ERP and an external 3rd party application.

The extension they needed was a few extra steps in the existing process, so it made sense to do it in SaaS, It was the right time for them to embrace Visual Builder and the resulting solution has been a great success.

Both APEX and Visual Builder have their place. They have different capabilities and which to use will depend on your needs. They’re both strategic to Oracle and innovation will continue.

But if you want to dig into the differences to help you decide, as a board member of ODTUG, I’ll be at our annual KSCOPE conference in June, where I’ll facilitate our 3rd annual ‘APEX or Visual Builder?’ open forum session.

So come back then for my blog on where the community of experts think we are today.