Ardent’s reality check for SaaS adoption

Hope you like vanilla

Customers no longer have control over the feature set of a cloud application post-purchase – a difficult concept to communicate to staff and other stakeholders.

“Some level of technical integration is stock-standard in any IT project,” Franklin said.

“The biggest job outside of that is educating the users and managers: this is an application that is pre-built, and we can't add functionality. We can add fields and things, but it’s otherwise akin to buying Excel.”

Franklin does have a few tricks up his sleeve, however:

“If you want new features and functionality added to it, you’ve got three options. First you talk to your middleware guys, ask them to look at the current list of web services  and see if there is any new functionality there that can be re-tooled.

“You might otherwise log a Software Access Request with Oracle, and beg them to add some specific functionality in the next release.

“Another way is to get out 35 business cards of people running the same software, and ask them to log a Software Access Request using the same exact words. It works for everybody if everybody gets in on the act.

"The only way we ever got enhancements to JD Edwards was to keep friends close and enemies even closer.”

What stays behind the firewall?

Franklin wasn't sure Ardent would buy more Oracle Fusion modules, even if the vendor did a better job of integrating them.

“You buy cloud when it becomes a commodity product; you buy an app for its functionality, upgradability, ease of use, its integration ability. And in our business you’re still going to have point of sale systems and vertical apps to connect to.

"Oracle isn’t going to write a gym membership system tomorrow. And those point of sales systems – whether they are connected in real-time or batching – will always need to sit at or near site.”

It’s entirely feasible that even as organisations like Ardent shift more and more of their apps to the cloud, much of the middleware layer might stay on-premise. Data-intensive apps are also unlikely to make a great fit for the cloud.

One has to consider the “tyranny of speed of access,” he said.

Oracle’s Fusion apps are hosted in Texas, USA. Delays of more than 1 or 1.5 seconds won’t cut it from a user-experience perspective, and bandwidth charges could be a big issue for Australian customers.

Files stored on Ardent's content management system are large enough that backups to Texas would be time and cost prohibitive.

“I think everybody is still learning about the cloud," he said. "Even in the last six months, the amount of functionality the vendors built in is wildly different.

"This time last year we had a sign-on to trial, now we’re using web services and and run trusted connections from our domain.

“The rules of the game are not written yet.”

Brett Winterford attended OpenWorld in San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.