Oracle’s 11i Picking Up After a Slow Start
Oracle's 11i E-Business Suite has taken awhile to gel with prospective customers but it's finally starting to gain popularity.
There are many reasons for the suite's slow adoption rate: When 11i, Oracle's first major Web application suite, hit the market back in 2000 it came replete with convoluted installation requirements and numerous programming bugs. To top it all off it placed heavy-handed constraints on its users. Now, however, all that's been ostensibly resolved and Oracle's customers are more up beat about deploying it.
Featuring a plethora of handy applications such as top of the range human resources, financial, customer relationship management, and supply chain management components, 11i nonetheless comes with the unhandy precondition that customers replace most of their existing applications and infrastructure.
In the midst of last-year's disastrous e-slump, this requirement didn't seem all too attractive. Today, however, 11i's broader range of business processes and functions make it seem more lucrative, despite it's pitfalls – even more so with the bug-issue apparently under control.
Sadly, convenience, usefulness, and relative freedom from bugs aren't the only reasons why Oracle customers are considering an upgrade to 11i. Recently Oracle indicated that by June 2003 it plans to end support altogether for 11i's predecessor, 10.7.
Given 11i's seeming incompatibility with “outsider” apps, Oracle has also advised its clients to standardize their business processes by sticking mostly with company's product-line. “Simply put, our clients should standardize on Oracle for common tasks,” explained Oracle's marketing vice president Lisa Arthur.
Thus far only 920 of Oracle's clients have decided to run with 11i. The company indicated, however, that a further 4,000 are in the process of deploying the suite with more expected to come on-board during 2002.
