Your only option is cloud user experience

We already know the number one reason for moving your people systems to the cloud is user experience. But is that really the only option for the thousands of happy E-Business Suite customers out there?

The good news is you do have options – both inside Oracle’s growing red stack and beyond (see Ivan’s no-nonsense write-up to cut through the rhetoric). The bad news is many of these are not actually options to deliver an improved user experience.

When it comes to it, you have just two:

1. Stay on vanilla Oracle E-Business Suite and battle with a poor user experience, or
2. Get a cloud user experience.

I should confess that the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 delivers a bunch of usability improvements: the simplified home page, table features, the ‘Skyros’ darker blue theme and a much longer list of smaller items. But I’m afraid you’re in for disappointment if you’re holding out for those – unless you love Fusion Classic…

So does that mean you’ve got to rip & replace to enhance the user experience? Not exactly. It’s certainly the option you’d have heard about the most and one you’ve most likely already evaluated (or plan to evaluate). Obviously, vendors are quick to tell you about new systems you can buy, so I’ll assume you’re already bored of hearing any more here.

Less familiar, however, is the plethora of solutions that fall under the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) umbrella, which are offered by the likes of IBM, Kony and, of course, Oracle. These help you build custom mobile apps and front-ends that deliver a bespoke cloud user experience whilst integrating with your existingenterprise systems. They usually integrate through web services, which means you don’t have to move a single byte of your core HR data – disruption is kept to a minimum, control remains in your hands and you don’t have to call in Super Mario to re-plumb the maze of existing data feeds.

You can also buy out-the-box apps, or templated custom apps, available from Oracle-validated partner solutions.  These are designed to achieve enhanced user experience in as little as a couple of weeks.  I call this user experience as a service (UXaaS).

Applaud’s solution is a UXaaS, offering both pre-packaged HCM apps and a platform component to configure your own mobile and desktop apps that we don’t offer out-the-box. A few years back, our front-end user experience was constrained by being on-premise. We had to rebuild it in the cloud to push boundaries and leverage mobile features such as push notifications, location, security, analytics and branding. Now, our user experience sits in the cloud yet continues to work seamlessly with E-Business Suite irrespective of whether that’s self-hosted or in someone else’s managed cloud.

You may assume this approach is exclusively for legacy systems like E-Business Suite. Not so: I recently spoke to a customer who built their own mobile apps using PaaS that sit on top of Cloud HCM.  I’ve also seen a marked increase in UXaaS vendors front-ending the very latest enterprise cloud releases, further evidence that vanilla products are falling behind increasing consumer expectations.  I wonder then, whether such approaches might just boast a surprisingly high shelf life – especially when complimenting both your current and future estate.

Having led Applaud through an on-premise to cloud product rebuild, I am now utterly convinced that the best user experiences can only be in the cloud.

Still, it’s good to know you have choice.

If you’d like to know more about Applaud and how our solutions could benefit your workforce please get in touch.