In a recent webinar hosted as part of Quest Experience Week, John Killen, Executive Director at Oracle, reviews Oracle’s overall application strategy, why Software as a Service (SaaS) is so compelling, and what makes Oracle SaaS unique.

You can’t miss the cloud digital transformation. It is happening globally and across industries with businesses leveraging its benefits to get ahead of competition. Killen thinks customer expectations and even the skilled workforce of today is contributing to the surge. He makes lots of great arguments for the cloud, for SaaS and Oracle’s SaaS especially. You’ll want to listen to the webinar on Quest’s Content Library, but here are a couple quotes from Killen about the value of the Cloud:

• “We’re ‘all in’ on Cloud,” referring to the leadership and strategy at Oracle. “We fundamentally believe that the business benefits to our customers are too compelling not to (be).
• “It is difficult to keep up if you work with on-premise software without frequent updates or changes to business processes… (it) makes it difficult to adapt and keep the pace of change.”
• “There is not a single Silicon Valley startup in IT that is getting funding for an on-premise type of application.”

The Oracle team understands that the switch doesn’t happen magically. Killen says that for many organizations, this migration will happen over time. If you are with one of the businesses requiring some time for the transition, Oracle has your back. To support businesses that need to ease into the transition, Oracle invests in application lines (e.g. JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, EBS). Killen talks about this briefly, but the Oracle Content Library is filled with information for you to review.

Ultimately, Killen says, you want to be not just on the Cloud but subscribing to SaaS. He describes a bumpy on-premise journey compared to a SaaS journey. With on-premise there is great effort to implement an upgrade but soon after you go live, you begin to slide towards out-of-date again. Rinse and repeat. The time between upgrades is often as long as six years and frustration grows with staff and customers during this time.

SaaS is fundamentally different. Go live dates are fast thanks to configured best practices instead of a host of customizations. Moreover, Killen says, “Oracle delivers multiple updates of new innovations multiple times a year as updates – not upgrades – so they are much more quickly adopted.”

Oracle isn’t the only SaaS provider, but Killen thinks it is the best. He calls it “The most complete cloud to support your whole organization” and talks about innovation that improves engagement, efficiencies and insight. Then he shows you what he means with a quick overview and a demonstration.

During the overview he shows how SaaS supports business processes in breadth and depth. The major business suites are finance, procurement, project management, supply chain, and human resources. Each subject area has numerous components but here is a breakdown of finance as an example:

• Global Accounting and Reporting
• Travel and Expense
• Revenue management
• Risk and Compliance
• Close and Consolidations
• Account Reconciliation
• Costing and Profitability
• Planning and Forecasting
• Strategic Planning
• Capital and Project Planning
• Tax Provisioning
• Narrative Reporting

During the demonstration, Killen talks about the real-time reporting and analytics embedded in the system. You do not need to manage it, he says, in any way. When you post accounting from your sub ledgers, it simultaneously updates in an analytics environment within the general ledger that becomes the single source of truth for your reporting. He is clearly a fan.

Each of the suites has one platform, one modern user experience; one secure, unified data model; embedded modern best practices; universal reporting; and analytics. There’s a long list of other benefits too. After a very exhaustive evaluation, Gartner, an industry analyst, recently recognized Oracle as leader for ERP Cloud. Oracle is ranked as an industry leader by Gartner in 20 different areas.

Check out the Oracle Finance Cloud webinar video replay and slide deck to learn more. Also, learn more about Oracle Cloud for Finance at COLLABORATE 18, April 22-26, 2018. Oracle Cloud Collaborate Conference content features a wide variety of education and networking opportunities selected by users like you, making it a very useful Oracle conference. More than 275 sessions covering Cloud, Big Data, Mobility, and security make this a valuable, jammed packed week to help you get the most out of your Oracle Cloud investment. Think collaborate 2018, which some call the Oracle collaborate cloud conference. Follow us for the latest news on Twitter at #c18lv.