Might as well do it.
as they are most likely paying for cloud licenses already.
Oracle’s launched a cloud migration service it says can “reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 percent” and “enables customers with applications running on premises to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Applications in as little as 20 weeks.” CTO and chair Larry Ellison said the “Soar” service makes it easier to migrate …
If it really is that difficult to upgrade to version "Next" on-premises, then it's also that difficult do so in the cloud.
Unless of course they have artificially made it difficult eg by refusing to publish upgrade plans, or have artificially made it "easier" by deleting customisation features. That somebody is of course using...
Its usually run adpatch, test, apply new patches, tweak the occasional CEMLI and patch again. Rinse and repeat.
Works for each R12 upgrade I did. 11i to 12 was a little more involved but was treading new grounds in 2009.
Id wonder how they cope with customisations as they are pretty much barred from cloud. I think even DFFs are removed now.
Many E-Business suite installs have been around for a long time. A lot of the customisation is very complex and was introduced years ago to make up for deficiencies in earlier releases. If the organisation can stand the impact of a business process re-engineering project to move up to the latest version with no customisations then the move can be much shorter.
This isn't just an issue with Oracle. I've successfully managed two non-Oracle ERP re-implementation where several man years of customisations were ditched. The end outcome was far better from an operating cost and business process perspective. It also freed up both organisation to carry on taking upgrades at low cost as they were now running 'vanilla' configurations.
If Larry says it's easy then it must be! The guy's never put a foot wrong or said some complete and utter horse crap that PHBs have believed, PHBs have then made we poor working techies implement based on Larry's BS!
Face it Larry your cloud offering is like comparing the Hello World source from any language you wish to name against the source of an O/S kernel, so far apart it's just not enough funny.
If there is one thing Larry is good at it's selling crap, every time we patch an exadata the thing goes down for the entire weekend, sometimes longer. All the technical staff keep saying "we need to get off this crap" but the CEO keeps signing the million dollar cheques to Larry. I wouldn't even begin the speculate what goes on in the background but if Larry's selling cloud there's a load of CEO's opening up their cheque books.
i definitely see some advantages on both the vendors ability to deliver a product and the customer's ability to consume a product on a SaaS model. we can whine all day about loss of control, etc, but fact is in many ways the "keeping the lights on" issue goes away and we can move on, consume, and get value faster no doubt.
Frankly, i think perpetual ROI is a myth. what do you really get with that annual support / maintenance bill? My experience is not much. Money better spend on mucho training and professional implementation services, and the ability to turn on / off services as needed without worrying about lock-in of depreciating a large capital asset. its just creates sluggish, non agile behavior.
However, in the tech world wallstreet is loving the subscription reliable reoccuring revenue. Any vendor not transforming to that model is going to have very rocky earnings calls. Larry is trying to keep the suits in NYC happy.