Collaborate 08 – Day 1

Today I have started my very first Collaborate Experience. It was
a very interesting day indeed, all of the presentations I went to
were of high value.

My program for today was:

• 10 thing you can do today to
  prepare for Fusion Applications – by Nadia Benjedou, Oracle Corp.
• E-Business Suite Customers
  Achieving business Values with oracle Fusion Middleware Today and
  Beyond – by Nadia Benjedou, Oracle Corp.
• E-Business Suite Release 12 –
  Technology direction and Highlights – by Arnand Subbaraman, Oracle
  Corp.
• Forget Triggers and Custom Code –
  Initiate your BPEL processes from E-Business Suite using Business
  Events
• Release 12 Upgrade Panel

10 thing you can do today to prepare for Fusion Applications

Nadia Benjedou, Oracle Corp.

This was a very interesting presentation to see. The presentation
literaly gave the 10 key focus areas to make a future upgrade to
Fusion Applications as easy as possible. Or should I say as less
complex? Upgrades of Oracle Applications are never easy, everyone
with a little experience in this area should know that. Anyway, I
will list the 10 areas down here:

• Move to the latest release
  • This might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons of
    marketing strategy. All of Oracle’s Applications (EBS, PeopleSoft,
    Siebel, JDEdwards (EnterpriseOne and World) and CRM On Demand) are
    Fusion ready, i.e. built to interact with Fusion Technology. This
    is the most important reason to move to each respective last
    version available at this moment to ease the migration/move to
    Fusion.
• Prepare a roadmap to evolve to the next release
  • Define Business and IT drivers – on a strategic level
  • Use resources like Oracle Insight to help you resolve issues
    from a customer perspective.
• Inventory your assets
  • Customizations
    • Types (Screens, Reports,
      Integrations)
    • What are they used for?
    • How do they integrate and with
      what
    • Technology
  • Critical Data
    • Who owns it
      (customers/suppliers/products)
    • Where is it being used
    • Is it clean?
• Rethink your Customization strategy
  • Engineer for the future! (What you built yesterday, is it
    still valid for tomorrow?)
• Consolidate Master Data
  • Critical Data like Customer,
    Product and Supplier Data, for example Items, COA, etc)
    • A good tool to use for this is
      Oracle’s Master Data Management
  • Most likely, when you are using multiple applications, your
    Master Data is fragmented. Consolidation is the keyword here, aka a
    canonical model, or Common Object Model if you wish.
    This model
    can be used to interact with MDM, which by itself can be upgraded
    to Fusion MDM relatively easily.
• Embrace SOA based Integration
  • Consider Pre-Built SOA
    • for Performance, Scalability, Availability and Security.
      These Pre-Built SOA components form Oracle’s Application
      Integration Architecture, a new Acronym I heard a lot
      today.
      Oracle has developed a lot of Process Integration Packs,
      aka PIPs. The nice thing about this Application Integration
      Architecture is that all of it’s supporting applications are
      relatively easily replacable. For Example, it becomes easier to
      migrate from E-Business Suite to Fusion Applications when you are
      using the AIA Pre built SOA components.
  • Build SOA yourself
    • Using SOA Components like WebServices, BPEL and ESB it is
      also possible to develop your own integration. This will lead to a
      lot more efforts, however, the solution is fitting your own
      situation best.
• Extend the Business Intelligence Portfolio
  • Nadia took us to the world of Oracle Analytic Applications,
    built on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
• Adopt Enterprise Reporting and
  Publishing tools like BI Publisher
• Secure your Global Enterprise
  • This is all about Oracle Identity Management
• Centralize Applications Product Lifecycle Management
  • We got an extensive tour around the possibilities of Oracle
    Enterprise Manager.

All in all a very interesting presentation that puts the whole
thing together for anyone looking to the longer term future of
his/her enterprise applications.

EBS Customers Achieving Business Values with Fusion Middleware
Today and Beyond

Nadia Benjedou, Oracle Corp.

This presentation was an E-Business Suite adaptation of the
previously described 10 things you can do to prepare for Fusion
Applications.

We were introduced to iREP, the Integration Repository, which is
available via http://irep.oracle.com
for 11i, and is shipped with Oracle E-Business Suite r12. One of the
very nice features (like I said before: Release 12 is Fusion Ready)
is that this Integration Repository integrates seamlessly with the
Oracle E-Business Suite Adapter which comes with Oracle SOA Suite
10.1.3.3. This adapter provides bidirectional, multimodal,
synchronous and asynchronous connectivity with the E-Business Suite.
The EBS integration interfaces are delivered to SOA as WebServices.
It interfaces with the iRep to expose only recommended public
integration interfaces, meaning a secure way of interfacing with your
EBS. The types of interfaces that are currently provided by the EBS
Adapter are:

• Interface Tables
• Views
• API’s
• Concurrent Programs
• XML Gateway
• EDI
• Business Events (about which later on some more)

We got an example of Daily Business Intelligence, about a customer
that was able to put a BI layer on top of WebServices to create an
interactive dashboard in order to show who is doing what, show
outstanding actions etc, all displayed in a dashboard with drill-down
(BI) functionality.

Release 12 Technology Direction and Highlights

Arnand Subbaraman, Oracle Corp.

This presentation was all about the future of Release 12.

Despite the rumors of Fusion Applications replacing the other
Applications of Oracle, Release 12 will remain for at least a couple
of years. Release 12.1 is scheduled for this year (2008), next year
Release 12.1+ is scheduled and after that (“beyond…”) it
will be Release 12.x. The keyword for the coming years is AIA. It
gives customers a choice whether they want to move to Fusion
Applications or stay with Release 12.

A lot of this presentation was already covered in earlier
presentations, marking the differences between 11i and R12.

Arnand also payed some attention to the Applications Management
Pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager. This AMP makes OEM the single
source of control for all your Applications environments. You can
manage, maintain, clone, etc. your applications from OEM with
wizards, scheduled tasks, etc. Interesting stuff (btw I am using a
lot of OEM with my current project already. Being able to manage
about 50 instances through OEM is a relief, compared to do everything
by hand in every different environment.).
A couple of interesting
future developments for the AMP are Hot cloning, EBS Patching,
adopting advanced Service Level Management capabilities and being
able to handle advanced topologies.

Arnand also covered some interesting things about iSetup and the
future of it, like wider product coverage, custom selection sets,
configuration management and enterprise rollout.

He also touched the point of AIA which was also explained during
the first two sessions by Nadia Benjedou.

All in all a very interesting show, complementing the previous two
sessions, completing my monday morning program.

Forget Triggers and Custom Code – Initiate your BPEL processes
from E-Business Suite using Business Events

Hilal Khan, Innowave Technology

Hilal suggested today it is much better to use Business Events
rather than Triggers and Custom Code to initiate BPEL processes.
Business Events come with Oracle E-Business Suite and can also be
developed as customizations. They are part of the Workflow Engine,
use Advanced Queueing infrastructure, are able to extend and/or
configure the Business Logic. They provide asynchronous messaging
without the need for customizing the standard code of EBS. You can
use the Business Events in combination with BPEL Process Manager to
communicate with external systems.

Why would one want to use Business Events?

• Robustness – it guarantees
  delivery
• Scalability
• Non intrusive
• Easily manageable
• No customizations
• Oracle Recommended

Comparing triggers against Business Events:

Triggers

• Require coding
• Require PL/SQL expertise
• Require Maintenance

Business Events

• No Coding
• No setup
• Maintenance Free
• require a single Profile Option to
  be set
• Need to be enabled separately

Again, for communication with the BPEL Process Manager we use the
Oracle Applications Adapter, provided by the SOA Suite.

A nice bonus to this presentation was the live demo Halil gave to
exemplify his point. In no more than 20 minutes, he created a
Business Event that would put a message on a queue when an Item is
created, a BPEL Process that dequeues this message, takes the
information, transtlates it to something more readable and puts it in
a textfile on the file system. Obviously, this was a very small
process and not a complex one, but the idea was clear. Nice
functionality, demoed very well and understandable.

Release 12 Upgrade Panel

This was a QA session with a couple of Oracle specialists and
Systems Integrators. There was no presentation, There was just
opportunity to exchange experiences and ask questions about upgrading
to Release 12. Most of the stuff was already known to me.

Highlights

• Upgrading to R12 will take – on
  average – about 6-9 months, depending on size, customizations,
  interfaces, etc. It can easily add up to 1 – 1.5 year.
• You have to count with an increase
  of about 20% for storage need
• Obviously, take as much measures prior to upgrading that will
  make your upgrade easier, like move to 10G database when still on
  11i. This will shorten your downtime with at least a couple of
  hours.

That was it for today. Hope to give a similar report tomorrow.