Oracle AI World: Oracle puts consultants on notice

Installing Oracle’s enterprise software can cost as much as running it for five years. That expense has helped sustain a huge industry of consultants and systems integrators who specialise in getting complex business applications working. Oracle now wants AI to take on much of the work, with a target of halving both implementation costs and the time involved.

At Oracle AI World in Las Vegas this week, the company unveiled an expanded Oracle AI Success Navigator platform and an open-source configuration registry, designed to automate tasks that traditionally occupy specialist consulting teams for months.

 “One of the challenges is the time and cost to implement is too long,” said Oracle customer success officer and executive vice-president Gary Miller, during a media briefing. “The cost to implement Fusion can be the same price as five years of Fusion running, right? Which is crazy. Would you spend five years of something to install it, when it’s going to get turned back over five years?”

Fusion Cloud Applications is Oracle’s suite of enterprise software for functions including finance and human resources. Installing it means examining how an organisation currently operates, transferring settings and information from older systems, and building links to software that the business still needs. The complexity can generate substantial professional-services fees before employees begin using the new applications.

“That is a collection of agents that can significantly, with humans – they augment the project team – implement Fusion in less than half the time, half the cost.”

Oracle’s formal announcement identifies six implementation agents, covering discovery, design, configuration, testing, integration and innovation. The claim about halving overall time and cost is Oracle’s projection, with early customer evidence relating to specific phases of work.

“So the first thing it does, it looks at your existing system, if that’s E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, analyses how you’re running today, your customisations. You feed it your project goals, your RFP, other data, and it will come out: okay, here’s what you’re dealing with today. Then it can help you design how Fusion will be implemented.”

The same approach extends to the connections between applications, often among the most expensive parts of a project.

“You can say, here’s my old integrations with a cash system or bank. It will take those and design the new integrations, code the new integrations and test them on Oracle Integration Cloud. So it’s a full suite of agents that work together with humans.”

Behind the configuration work lies Oracle’s Fusion Setup and Configuration Registry, or FSCR, a collection of machine-readable instructions that agents can follow to configure Fusion applications. Oracle has made the registry open source, allowing implementation partners and customers to use the same instructions when building their own automation tools. It addresses a recurring problem for consultants: translating product documentation and a customer’s requirements into thousands of individual system settings, then checking that the settings work together.

Oracle cited US healthcare provider Lexington Health as an early customer. It reported an 80% reduction in certain design and configuration efforts

Large systems integrators have built substantial businesses around enterprise software installations. Their teams perform work that ranges from understanding business requirements to configuring and testing systems, while fees often reflect the number of specialists and months required. The prospect of completing much of the repeated setup with agents will change the way customers evaluate those bills.

It also gives smaller consultancies access to technology that larger firms have begun developing internally.

Miller said customers would not pay an additional platform charge for the implementation capability, although they would continue to pay Oracle or its partners for consulting services.

“We’re not charging for the platform. We didn’t charge for it for the ongoing innovation. We won’t charge for it for implementation. Obviously, if they want services to help, or if their partners want it, they have to pay for the services. But the platform is included.”

For South African businesses operating combinations of ageing enterprise software and newer cloud services, analysing existing customisations and rebuilding integrations can absorb a big chunk of an upgrade budget. Those are tasks targeted by the new agents. The effect on local implementers will depend on how much of that work can be automated in complex, real-world projects.

Where does that leave the consultants? Well, Oracle expects partners to earn more of their income from helping clients expand their use of the software after installation.

“Our message to the system integrators is: look, if you do a great job and get them live and get them value, you can probably have ongoing work to help them go live as a start. And then you’re going to help them adopt more AI features, adopt more AI agents, build AI agents. So if you can get them live in six months, you can get a lot more of this other work.”

For Oracle, the commercial incentive is immediate: a faster installation means a customer can begin operating on its cloud applications sooner, with more opportunity to adopt additional capabilities.

“The economics here have changed, but if they look at the lifetime value of the customer, they can make it to their advantage,” said Miller. “And we want more partners to go faster. From our perspective, the faster customers go live, the better.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.