This week, Supply Chain Matters is attending the Oracle Open World Conference being held in San Francisco. One of the most significant announcements concerning the supply chain management community announced at this year’s Open World was that of the availability of Oracle SCM Cloud. Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, in his opening keynote on Sunday, made specific mention of the availability of SCM Cloud as a significant achievement.
What makes this application suite noteworthy is that it represents a rather broad-based product suite available on a public cloud-based platform. It includes integrated suite functionality support for product lifecycle management, supply chain planning, procurement, customer fulfillment, transportation, warehousing as well as manufacturing management. Oracle developers initially focused this cloud-based product suite on hi-tech and industrial manufacturing business process support needs but Oracle executives indicate that broader industry support functionality will evolve rapidly.
From our lens, Oracle has developed one of the broadest cross-functional supply chain management, public cloud based applications currently available in the marketplace. That stated, there are qualifiers in that this public cloud suite provides standard functionality as opposed to the ability to support customized customer business needs. Its strength resides in faster time-to-value and potentially lower IT infrastructure deployment costs.
Paths to the cloud are described as complimentary, incremental or as transformational, “big-bang” deployments. Application code design was defined as the same as Oracle’s current on premise software applications thus providing customer’s broader options as to combinations of either on premise or full cloud deployment.
Rick Jewell, Oracle’s senior vice president of SCM applications indicated in today’s briefing that the cloud suite should meet nearly 80 percent of broad-based functionality needs. Joining in today’s announcement was IBM Global Services which is offering its own complimentary deployment services that include seven, process-centric rapid-start deployment templates. They include:
- Indirect procure-to-pay
- Ideation-to-commercialization
- Logistics
- Plan-to-build
- Quote-to- cash
- Order-to-cash
- Product and customer hub
Oracle is currently recruiting early adopters for this new SCM Cloud application offering a dedicated vice-president to oversee each deployment.
Supply Chain Matters began noting the pending development of Oracle SCM Cloud almost three years ago from previous Open World briefings and it’s good to note that the application has finally arrived.
Stay here for continuing coverage of Open World 2015.
Bob Ferrari
