Better together: How Oracle Cloud Infrastructure powers Fusion Applications

Each year, we’re seeing businesses discover new ways to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to propel growth and innovation. This year is no different, with Oracle rolling out a smorgasbord of new capabilities, features and tools that our customers tell us have made a big difference for their business and the people they serve.

When we created OCI, we had the opportunity to build a completely new cloud, drawing on lessons from the market and from what other cloud providers were building. At a minimum, we wanted to make sure we provide an environment that is equal or better in terms of performance, reliability, and security than a dedicated on-prem infrastructure.

We’ve achieved that goal and our applications customers are reaping the rewards of Oracle Cloud. The OCI platform is agile, extensible and offers more than a hundred cloud infrastructure and platform services that you can leverage within your ecosystem. All your apps and technologies – Oracle and non-Oracle work better together on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They are all part of the same cloud and available in 40 cloud regions around the world or in flexible hybrid configurations wherever you need them.

FedEx works better together with OCI

Known for its innovative package delivery services, FedEx wanted to bring the same innovation to its back office. They started by taking their on-prem Oracle E-Business Suite and other custom apps and moving the entire footprint to OCI. A  cascade of benefits followed: The company cut costs by offloading data center workloads to the cloud, boosted system performance and reliability during busy holiday seasons, and gained better disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities. The transformation continues as FedEx adds more Oracle Cloud Fusion Applications as part of a co-existence strategy featuring a mix of other tech providers. 

Connecting all your apps

The OCI platform is engineered to connect workflows and business processes across the enterprise, supplying the foundation of a modern user experience. For example, it is that platform that  Oracle Cloud Fusion HCM is built on to simplify, personalize and digitize the entire employee experience, from recruitment to retirement. The platform works with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP applications to automate end-to-end financial processes, driving outsized performance gains and saving money by enabling companies to move costly on-prem workloads to the cloud.

Oracle provides cloud infrastructure and cloud business applications on a secure, connected platform that helps you run all functional areas of your business. Because Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), you can easily unify security, governance, and data management across Fusion Cloud Applications and your other business-critical workloads, including extensions of Fusion Cloud Applications, new applications you build on OCI, and third-party applications that connect through OCI. Learn more on why Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are better together here.

Clearly Oracle’s SaaS applications work better because of OCI. But that’s just a start. OCI helps your whole business work better, including any other type of apps you may already have on hand. Using pre-built connectors and services available in Oracle Integration, you can easily interconnect with your existing on-prem apps, any non-Oracle apps such as Salesforce or Workday, or any new apps you decide to build on your own or with ISV partners. For modern enterprises with complex IT footprints, these integration capabilities streamline workflows and business processes so you can get to market faster.

Tying Western Digital together

Oracle’s integration capabilities were crucial to helping disk-drive and storage manufacturer Western Digital transform its business. They helped it interconnect with more 2,000 apps, including Oracle SaaS apps, custom apps, and ISV apps, speeding access to data from 36 hours to 20 minutes, shrinking ERP refreshes to minutes, and accelerating decision-making to drive growth.

Unlocking hundreds of capabilities

You can get even more value out of your Oracle Fusion applications by leveraging built-in OCI services such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and a host of other advanced technologies, all of which can be built into your applications’ user interfaces and workflows to enhance user productivity.

For example, you can deploy Oracle Digital Assistant to create conversational experiences for business applications through text, chatbots, and voice interfaces. The natural language processing feature has become wildly popular at many organizations and can be easily “trained” to “understand” your unique business. Oracle itself uses the digital assistant to help speed expense reporting and procurement tasks.

With OCI, you also get access to the latest AI technology to add “intelligence” into every part of your business. With OCI, you also get an analytics platform to help visualize your data from any source and give people self-service access to business insights via dashboards. You can even share the data with suppliers and customers.

Extending to new apps and clouds

Sometimes you need to build new applications from scratch to meet unique or emerging business needs. Oracle Cloud empowers you with all the tools needed to build new applications and efficiently deploy them into your application ecosystem.

There is practically no limit to how far you can extend OCI – including to any other clouds you’re running across your broader IT landscape. Oracle proactively has built a multi-cloud strategy, so if you have environments where you’re using other clouds, that’s perfectly fine – OCI will work together with those clouds too. For example, Oracle recently announced a database service that shares company data between OCI and Microsoft Azure like they’re a single cloud.

And if you need more control over your data and applications, you can set up your own OCI Dedicated Region to meet special security, regulatory or residency requirements.

Integra saves with multicloud strategy

After recently migrating 140+ systems to OCI, Integra LifeSciences wanted to bring more data to its multicloud analytics process. The answer was to get the best of both worlds by taking advantage of Oracle Interconnect to Azure to process its analytics 87% faster.

Guarding your cloud

Our customers continue to express concern about security and cyberthreats, and that’s driving many of them to OCI, which offers an industry-leading defense-in-depth strategy and automated solutions to help speed security decision-making. One of the innovations we announced at Oracle CloudWorld is Oracle Cloud Guard Fusion Applications Detector, which automatically scans the environment to uncover potential threats and then serve up smart recommendations to remediate any vulnerabilities. For example, in Oracle HCM Cloud, Cloud Guard Fusion Applications Detector can create an alert if an employee’s information is mishandled, such as if an HR manager outside their region changes security privileges for another employee in a different region.

Meeting you where you are

Ultimately the Oracle Cloud is about meeting you where you are. If you’re in a place where your apps already work well on-prem, then you can move them to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and get advantages quickly in terms of performance, agility, and scalability. If you’ve taken the next step and started to implement Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications, you can take the time you need to rearchitect your business systems and work with Oracle to get the most out of OCI. Over time, you can phase out your older applications and seamlessly move into the future in a co-existence mode.

With OCI, you get the ability to move at the pace of your business, starting from wherever you happen to be.

Learn more about how OCI can help your business modernize at your own pace. Watch the replay of our presentation from Oracle CloudWorld here.