Legacy Oracle apps users look to alternatives, including cloud

Oracle Fusion a "trigger event for sales engagement" says SuccessFactors vice president

Oracle's aggressive push to persuade users of its legacy enterprise applications to migrate to its Fusion platform has sparked a feeding frenzy among rivals - including a growing number of cloud service providers - as the shift gives customers an opportunity to appraise the alternatives.

The migration path from legacy Oracle applications, including JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, is such a big move that many users are seeing it as an opportunity to look elsewhere. Once the move is made, users will be locked into a wide Oracle platform.

"It's a massive trigger event for sales engagement and, interestingly, more than 35 per cent of our customers right now are Oracle customers, who are running Oracle's HRIS [human resources information system]," said Philip Carty, vice president and general manager, Americas, at SuccessFactors (now part of Oracle rival SAP).

The company, he says, has a full list of PeopleSoft customers and is actively talking to them as they consider their next step. "We know who everybody is," said Carty. Ultimately, he said, "it's about either the religion of Oracle or about the best solution. And I think we have a good shot of winning."

Oracle claims that some 250 customers are now running Fusion at various levels - which still leaves the majority of customers still to make the move as Oracle support for many of their legacy software packages draws to a close.

At the same time, SuccessFactors is also working with new parent SAP to broaden its own cloud-based software. On the one hand, it is adding extra functions in addition to the core talent management services, as well as geographically with improved localisation.

"I believe - from what others tell me - that Workday is very US centric in its capabilities. So what we are planning to deliver with our release coming out in July is true global HRIS," said Carty.

He added: "A lot of that capability is an acceleration of the roadmap. We have an additional 700 engineers that have come over from SAP working on just this piece of our solution. We also have this deep knowledge that SAP has around localisation. SAP has people in 70 countries that just do localisation every day."

In July, he said, payroll capabilities will be added to SuccessFactors' range of cloud services.