“It’s complicated.” The popular facebook status sometimes – and understandably – can explain the progress your business has made to the cloud. You know the advantages to being fully on board the cloud but there are a few reasons your company hasn’t moved forward as much as you would like. If this describes the status of your business and you want to find solutions, the webinar, Leverage Oracle PaaS on Your EBS/PSFT/JDE Journey from On-Premise to SaaS, might be exactly right for you.

Huang, Director of Product Management for Oracle Cloud Platform, opens the session by reviewing the advantages the cloud offers. He describes the needs of a modern business for more agility, less IT maintenance and more innovation.

Huang also reviews the challenges of moving to the cloud. For many, the challenge is that the systems commonly used (e.g. E Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel) are NOT developed as cloud applications. They have an on-premise footprint and the jump to the cloud can seem challenging from there.

What do you need to do, then, to prepare to move to the cloud? Huang says many businesses want to simply move the footprint by the hosting utility directly to Oracle, but the applications are running “as is.” You are not getting SaaS applications this way.

Huang describes successful options that he has seen his customers make on the journey to the cloud. These include complimentary, incremental or transformational – and these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Complimentary could include a variety of approaches including simply hosting on the cloud to reduce IT costs. Incremental could include taking some of the business functions from off-premise and moving those to start on the cloud. Businesses using this approach can move non-business critical functions first and learn about the cloud experience with minimal risk. Smaller businesses can make a transformational move to the cloud. Regardless of which path a business takes, Huang says you can expect you will probably have on-premise and cloud presence.

Huang describes how the need for innovation relates to progress in cloud systems. The needs could be related to real-time streaming of data for events such as ordering, payments, medical decisions, etc. Your business may be demanding innovation in engagement – primarily smart apps, chat boxes and other consumer engagement channels. Each of these opportunities drive the need for the rapid innovation platform for the cloud.

A successful platform that makes rapid innovation possible works with on-premise applications and SaaS applications. The requirements: it needs to be on the cloud, SaaS aware, secure, and able to cater to the new style of developing applications – cloud native, API-first microservices, multi-channeled and citizen developed. To meet these requirements, Oracle offers the solution of leveraging the Oracle Cloud Platform coupled with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to build innovations on top of Oracle SaaS. Sounds complicated? Oracle has solved the complicated part for you. Oracle offers the applications footprints in the cloud as the transitional end state for the JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite customers. The applications delivered here have the ability to be tailored. They help to connect and extend SaaS and make it possible to build your own applications and processes on SaaS.

Oracle Platform includes the following through its simple, pre-integrated, suite-based offering:

• Data management
• Application development
• Big data
• Business Analytics
• Content and experience
• Enterprise integration
• Data Integration
• IT management
• Identity and security

Branding, custom fields and other tailing opportunities are available through SaaS tools on the Oracle Platform. (You will want to discontinue your on-premise practices of customizations as you will have challenges with upgrades.) Huang reviews and demonstrates the tailoring opportunities you’ll have through SaaS that accommodate upgrades smoothly and allow you to consume innovations as quickly as you can. He describes in-depth the SaaS extensions that can be made with Pixel-Perfect UI.

In addition to all Oracle Platform offers to extend functions, it provides tools to connect applications, processes, data and devices. These are optimized for cloud-to-cloud integration, cloud-to-on-prem integration and augmentations with process automation and application programming interface management. Huang also describes how process integration and bulk data management can be accommodated through Oracle Platform. These offerings make it possible for a business to focus on outcomes instead of administration.

After describing Oracle Platforms capacities for extension and connection, Huang quickly reviews the offerings for security, then describes analysis in depth. The analytics section is especially important for business users as Huang notes important change from on-premise to SaaS that you’ll want to be aware of.