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Tag: cloud

Key Integrations and Extensions for Oracle SaaS Applications

Posted on by Ces_creative

Common application integrations and integration options for Oracle Cloud ecosystem

Cloud is now a key component of the IT stack that connects the enterprise.  The IT savvy companies are shifting to cloud and moving their internal systems to the new cloud-based ecosystem.  The ERP vendors are not staying behind in this evolution.  They have now come with the cloud version of their software and offer it in a SaaS model.  The companies are getting inclined towards sourcing SaaS services more and more to achieve simplified data flow, minimize complexity, and improve operational efficiency.  Oracle ERP has also come up with cloud version of its various modules: HCM, Finance, Payroll, Order Management, Procurement, etc.

The needs of the new ecosystem

SaaS based solutions like Oracle ERP are changing the IT landscape for a while now.  Many emerging companies are harvesting value from it.  However, the cloud ecosystem has the same need as the on-prem systems.  It needs to talk to other systems and third-party applications for seamless data exchange.

The biggest challenge is integrating the legacy systems to SaaS based systems as the companies’ IT architecture has been built decades ago.  There is also a need for one SaaS service to talk to another SaaS service.  While a SaaS based system provides a great value, the IT is now tasked with enabling integrations with other SaaS systems as well as Legacy systems.

” While a SaaS based system provides a great value, the IT is now tasked with enabling integrations with other SaaS systems as well as Legacy systems. “

Key Oracle Clouds and Integrations

If a business uses Oracle SaaS applications, it must integrate it with other applications as well for a seamless interaction between different business components.  Oracle ERP Cloud offers various modules for different business functionality across Finance, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Payroll, Order Management, and Procurement.  Oracle ERP Cloud Adapter is used to connect to Oracle Cloud ERP to other applications.  It allows easy integration of on-prem or SaaS applications with Oracle ERP Cloud without getting into the specifications involved in integration.

Below are a few key integrations that Oracle SaaS applications often use:

Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud

Key SCM business events are: Inventory Management, Maintenance, Manufacturing, Order Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Procurement, and Supply Chain Collaboration and Visibility.  Oracle ERP Cloud Adapter allows easy integration with online apps, points of sale (POS), and digital assistants such as ChatBot.  This simplifies the process of reaching out to finance and operations data and streamline repetitive tasks.

Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud

The Oracle ERP Cloud Adapter allows easy integration of on-prem and other SaaS based HR applications with Oracle HCM Cloud without having any knowledge on the specs involved in the integration.  Oracle HCM cloud integrates with ADP Global Payroll and uses ADP Global Payroll interface to source salary and earnings details of employees in a specified format.  Time clock integration is used to track employee’s attendance and effort for a chosen period. 

Oracle Cloud Financials 

Oracle Cloud Financials provides decision-enabling insights into a company’s financial position and offers tailored solution for business organizations of every size.  The cloud platform harmonizes accounting processes from multiple ERP and transactional systems and offers host-to-host integrations with Banks for uninterrupted payment transactions with trading community.  Oracle Cloud Financials module helps companies to make informed business decisions using intuitive data visualization and graphical insights of financial information.

” Oracle ERP Cloud Adapter allows easy integration of on-prem or SaaS applications with Oracle ERP Cloud without getting into the specifications involved in integration. “

image of oracle fusion middleware

Integration with middleware

Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) is a fully managed service that allows companies to integrate on-prem, cloud or both applications, automate operations, create visual applications, and gain insights into business processes.

Talend Cloud is a complete end-to-end data integration and management platform, designed to allow business and IT to work together to deliver trusted data throughout their organization.

MuleSoft, Oracle’s partner, offers a hybrid integration platform that can be deployed on-premises, on the cloud, or both.  It is a scalable runtime engine for integrations, APIs, and microservices.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web Services integrate external applications with Oracle ERP Cloud for the credit-to-cash business process.  The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure APIs are typical REST APIs that use HTTPS requests and responses.  Oracle REST APIs are used to view and manage data stored in Oracle Financials Cloud.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) manages a set of data formats that are used to exchange formal business documents between companies.  Oracle Cloud Integration provides support for B2B e-commerce with B2B for Oracle Integration.  It Integrates application data to trading partners via EDI.

Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) platform manages the entire spectrum of unstructured content in various formats such as documents, graphics, Web pages, scanned images, e-mail, and records.  Oracle HCM cloud uses as its content management system.  Files in various formats can be imported, exported and archived using UCM.

CES Accelerators

CES has extensive experience in Oracle Cloud integration and has built accelerators for integration as part of its Oracle SaaS solutions.  Key features of CES accelerators are: reusable code, compatibility with various file formats, methodology for deployment, and cloud integration testing expertise.

CES brings in the best expertise and practices on Oracle Cloud integration services to seamlessly integrate existing and third party applications, automate operational processes, and extract real-time business metrics using dashboards. For more information or a conversation on how CES can help provide Oracle Cloud Integration services, contact us at sales@cesltd.com

3 Things CIO’s and CTO’s Should Focus on for Their Journey to Cloud

Posted on by Ces_creative

If you have delayed your cloud journey till now, you should do this.

Cloud environment is scalable, reliable, convenient, cost-effective, and easily accessible.  To reduce operational costs and mitigate security risks, to meet the rapidly increasing capacity needs and accommodate new geographies, a company must shift to the cloud. Cloud migration gives a company competitive edge and keeps it ahead of business rivals. The time to migrate to cloud was yesterday.

It is difficult to imagine that a business has not started their cloud journey yet.  But, in case business priorities did not allow the organization to look deep and hard into cloudifying the IT stack and business applications, we have a few suggestions to make. 

The CIO/CTO of such organization should immediately form a taskforce to create a business case for cloud migration.  The taskforce may even be asked to develop a roadmap for migration. The taskforce could comprise of IT Executives, Architects, and Business Function representatives.  The CIO/CTO may head the taskforce.    

” The CIO/CTO should immediately form a taskforce that will create a business case for cloud migration. “

The journey to cloud will be long and cumbersome.  There must be different people in charge of different aspects of this journey.  A CIO/CTO may be the overall in-charge but there are a few key areas that the CIO should focus on to ensure success of cloud migration.  Below are top 3 focus areas that should be close to a CIO/CTO’s chest:

  • Technical and Domain Knowledge
  • Migration Methodology
  • Program Governance

Focusing on these areas will help with assessment of the staff capabilities, development of an approach to the target state, and progress-tracking of the cloud journey.

Technical and Domain Knowledge

Assessment of current team capabilities is an important aspect in planning the cloud journey.  The current employees are well versed in the legacy technology. Their business domain knowledge is critical to the successful migration of the applications to the cloud.  But they would need training and retooling to upgrade their skills.  IT will have to understand the skills gap. They will have to involve business in explaining and justifying the budget needed to fill this gap.  This assessment will also help in determining sourcing requirements to fill the gap.  The IT department should work closely with the HR department in this assessment.

Migration Methodology

Agile or iterative methodology is the norm, however, the IT will have to go a step further and decide a specific one from the various flavors of these methodologies.  With any business in any industry, documentation of the legacy systems is conspicuous by its absence or incompleteness.  A business may have to use Test-Driven Development methodology for migration.  This would ensure that a verifiable Definition of Done (DoD) is captured upfront for every application and every business scenario.

There are several vendors/System Integrators who bring their own methodology to assist with cloud migration.  Some bring just a framework comprising best practices while others bring a methodology which is tightly coupled with the toolset that they sell.  A business has to decide whether they can handover the keys to an SI (Systems Integrator) and let the SI drive the show.  Or, the business could leverage the SI’s expertise only as a consulting partner for cloud migration.

” IT will have to work closely with HR to determine skills gap, training and sourcing requirements.  “

Program Governance

Cloud journey is long and arduous.  A robust set of Program Management and Governance practices may have to be institutionalized.  A few important practices are:

  • ROI calculators and prioritization framework
  • Guides, checklists and templates
  • Stakeholder communication plan
  • Program dashboard to monitor progress and measure success

Communication with the business stakeholders and field operations is one of the most important activities of such endeavor.  Communications to update the end-users may also be needed.  A good stakeholder communication framework would be necessary and must be established upfront.

If the entire cloud migration project is outsourced to an SI, a good set of delivery milestones and tollgates must be established in the contract.  The business must be ready to provide the needed support and attention to the SI partner. 

The above are just a few of the key focus areas in developing a cloud migration approach.  These help provide guiderails for a company starting on a cloud journey.  The CIO/CTO will have to keep adjusting the plan as BAU is still important while the journey takes place.  Ultimately, Customer Experience (CX) would be the yard stick for defining and measuring cloud migration success.

” The CIO/CTO will have to keep adjusting the plan as BAU is still important while the cloud journey takes place. “

For a detailed discussion and to know the key considerations for Cloud Migration, you may refer to our other article – Cloud Migration: Lessons From Cyber Trenches And Foundries.  For more information or a conversation on how CES can help with Cloud Migration, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.

Cloud Migration: Lessons From Cyber Trenches and Foundries

Posted on by Ces_creative

Key considerations for developing a sound cloud migration strategy

The cyber world is witnessing rapid changes in technology and business processes. The millennial or digital-native companies have lived on the cloud from day one.  However, the legacy companies do not have that advantage.  They are required to cloudify without impacting their existing business operations.  Cloudification provides an opportunity to companies of all kinds to reengineer their business processes.  It helps ensure system availability, data protection, and smooth rollback/recovery.  Most importantly, it offers improvement in overall operational efficiency.

System Integrators

The technology market is flooded with System Integrators who claim to have expertise in cloud migration.  Companies need an experienced partner who can devise an appropriate migration strategy and ease their journey to the cloud.  They need a partner who will travel with them through thick and thin with a stake in the success.

Cloud Migration: Key Considerations

CES is a System Integrator that has successfully guided customers in agribusiness, bioscience, ecommerce and other industries to migrate to cloud.  In our experience, the following aspects must be considered in developing a strategy for cloud migration.

  • Planning:  It is important to develop a prioritization framework for determining the order in which the business applications should be moved to the cloud.  A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.  It takes into consideration all the key parameters that influence the success of an implementation.

A wholistic approach to doing this would be to consider prioritization of technology stacks, technology tiers, business functions, and applications.  In determining whether the migration approach should be a lift-and-shift or cloud-native development, consideration may be given to decoupling the front-end from the backend and migrating them independently. 

A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.

  • Architecture:  Certain applications or certain parts of the technology stack may need to be retained or re-written or retired.  We should consider pros and cons for options like – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Function as a Service (FaaS), Backend as a Service (BaaS) – in reimagining the future business and technology architecture.

Breaking application architecture into micro apps and micro services via Domain Driven Design (DDD) would be worth considering. Large monolithic applications are hard to maintain and scale. Newer applications follow the micro services-based architecture. The front-end and mobile applications can be broken in micro apps for specific functionality. This eliminates single point of failure, reduces down-time, improves performance, increases scalability, etc.  This also helps bring the cost of infrastructure down as many smaller instances are generally cheaper than one large instance of combined capacity.

  • Platform Vendor Selection:  AWS, Azure and Google are the main Cloud Service Providers.  However, depending on the business need, consideration may be given to niche providers like Rackspace or even a more traditional IBM if it makes compatibility and economic sense. 

Then, there could be a need to migrate thick-client desktops to the cloud and access them via VMware for easy portability and/or security reasons.  An experienced SI should be able to review your compute, storage, and bandwidth needs and recommend the right platform vendor.

  • Methodology:  An iterative or agile methodology is suited for modern application development.  In deciding the right methodology, companies may need to assess their resource skill level as well as the systems documentation quality.  For instance, if the system documentation levels are low, which is normally the case for traditional companies with legacy systems, Test Driven Development (TDD) approach would be a suitable methodology for Cloud Migration.  This would ensure that a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) has been documented and agreed upon upfront.
  • Technology: The technology selection is perhaps the most difficult decision to make because of the existence of a plethora of technologies in the market with every technologist having their own favourite.  There are proprietary software and community-supported open-source software to choose from.  We have technologies like .NET Core, Node JS, Python, Java, RoR, etc. for the backend and have Angular, ReactJS, VueJS, Blazor, etc. for the frontend of applications.  A good SI will provide an unbiased advice on what technology would fit best in an organization.
  • Teams: The technology and domain skills of individuals is an important consideration.  It helps in determining the number of sprints, the size of scrums, the throughput of teams, defining milestones, etc.  This assessment also helps in determining skills gap, training and sourcing requirements.  The IT departments should work closely with the HR department in this assessment.
  • Other Considerations: There are other aspects like company policies, security, operating procedures, regulatory requirements, maintainability, etc. to keep in mind as well.  Data backup and data retention policies, down-time requirement, user base, geographic presence, etc. are also important considerations in developing a good cloud migration strategy.

The TDD approach ensures a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) is documented and agreed upon upfront.

An Ideal Partner for Cloud Migration

An ideal SI partner would have experience and a proven cloud migration framework to assess and develop a tailored strategy for the needs of any IT department.  They would take into consideration the combination of people, processes, and technologies to develop the right tools like, checklists, templates, calculators, reusable assets, etc. to expedite the migration process.

An experienced Cloud Migration Partner will help you evolve into a “Cloud Native” IT department.  Cloud Native computing is helping companies upgrade existing applications, build new applications, and deliver automated services across private, public and hybrid clouds faster.

For more information or a conversation on Cloud migration, please contact rohit.vipinmathews@cesltd.com.  If you are interested to know how CES can help  you in your cloud journey, get in touch with us at sales@cesltd.com.

To Cloudify or Not To Cloudify: The Question is No More Why, But When. So, Why Not Now?

Posted on by Ces_creative

If you have delayed your cloud journey till now to gain second mover advantage, your time is up.

Cloud migration: The need of the hour

The businesses that wanted to have the second mover advantage, for them the inevitable has arrived.  They can no longer put off their plans to cloudify their business systems. There is a constant need to evolve and move to newer, comprehensive solutions and have flexibility in scaling up/down the technology infrastructure resources.  This coupled with the need to meet the expanding needs of enterprises and dynamic demands of customers, businesses have no choice but to take the journey to the cloud.  Migration to cloud offers cost effective storage and flexible access to data in addition to several other benefits.

The reasons for the delay

There are a few reasons — some of them justifiable – why some businesses and their IT departments have waited till now to cloudify their IT.

  • Cloud technology was not mature
  • Lack of a business case (cost vs benefits)
  • Did not know where to start
  • Lack of in-house capability or good outsourcing option

One of the major reasons companies had put off their cloud adoption was a lack of mature System Integrators (SI) they could rely on. 

Selecting the right system integrator

If a business thought that the entire process of cloudification is cumbersome, they should worry no more. The market is now filled with experienced Cloud Service providers and SI’s who can help with the migration process.

There are the white-glove SI partners who can assist their customers with insight, strategy, and execution. They can walk you through every step, from planning to implementation to training, so businesses can reap the most out of the cloud-based system – but all at a high premium.  

On the other hand, there are those less experienced System Integrators who can provide cloud migrating services for any budget.  They could be very good executioners of your cloud migration strategy if you have one. However, they may not have the expertise to sail you in the right direction or navigate through unforeseen turbulence. 

Then there is CES that partners with a customer to assist with a cloud migration strategy and customizes solutions to accommodate the unique needs of the customer without demanding a hefty premium.

It’s time the second movers got future-ready with Cloud migration plans without any further delay.

What makes CES the right choice

Cloud migration is an imperative that every organization is facing.  However, there are some important aspects to keep in mind to make the journey successful.  It is important to understand which legacy applications should be retained and which to be replaced, which one needs to be re-written and which to be retired.  Then there are considerations of which technology stack should be moved first.  Should it be a migration for IaaS or PaaS; or for FaaS or BaaS?  CES can bring deep insights and help with these decisions.

CES has experience in all three major cloud platforms – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – to help move a business to the cloud.  We have helped several businesses, from start to finish, in migrating their IT systems to cloud.  We have taken up multi-year migrations and walked businesses through this important and intensive journey.  Our solution is flexible and service cost-effective.

For example, we helped a customer, who is a leading provider of integrated business solutions for the agribusiness industry, migrate to cloud.  The client embarked on a decade-long journey to cloud-enable their software platform to host the software on the cloud and provision it from there in a SaaS model.  They started the journey five years ago and engaged CES as a partner of choice in this migration.  CES helped the business with assessment, methodology, and technical execution of the migration process.  Migrating to the cloud helped the business improve flexibility and maintainability of their SaaS infrastructure and its provisioning.  It led to significant cost savings but more importantly it improved overall Customer Experience (CX) of their software service manifold. 

CES brings insights, helps with key decisions, and offers value at comparatively more practical consideration.

Cloud is not the limit

Cloud environment is scalable, cost-effectiveness, convenient, accessible, and reliable.  To reduce operational costs and mitigate security risks, to meet the rapidly increasing capacity needs and accommodate new geographies, a company needs to shift to the cloud. Cloud migration gives a company the much-needed competitive edge over business rivals.  And the time to act is now! 

Those who have refrained till now in order to gain the second mover advantage may feel tempted to wait even longer.  Though the option of further delaying and waiting for the migration costs to go down even more is tempting, it is not a well thought out decision.  The time to migrate to cloud later will be longer as the legacy applications will have greater technology chasm to bridge.  The competitors who went ahead in this journey will have matured more and will be in a better position to take advantage of newer technologies in future as their systems will be comparatively nimbler and can easily adapt to change. 

In summary, a CIO or CTO can no longer afford to put off their plans to cloudify their business systems.  The era of cloud has already arrived for a while.  A business will gain no incentive by delaying any further their journey to the cloud.

Please stay tuned for our next blog on “3 things a CIO should focus on in creating a Cloud Migration roadmap”.  For more information or a conversation on how CES can help with Cloud Migration, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.