Oracle Applications

Oracle Applications comprise the applications software or business software of the Oracle Corporation. The term refers to the non-database and non-middleware parts.

Oracle sells many functional modules which use the Oracle RDBMS as a back-end, notably Oracle Financials, Oracle HRMS, Oracle SCM, Oracle Projects,^[1] Oracle CRM and Oracle Procurement.

Oracle initially launched its application suite with financials software in the late 1980s. The offering as of 2009 extends to supply-chain management, human-resource management, warehouse-management, customer-relationship management, call-center services, product-lifecycle management, and many other areas. Both in-house expansion and the acquisition of other companies have vastly expanded Oracle's application software business.

Oracle released Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS/ e-BS) Release 12 (R12) – a bundling of several Oracle Applications applications – in February 2007. The release date coincided with new releases of other Oracle-owned products: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft.

Products

Oracle Corporation's application portfolio consisted as of 2012 of the following software suites and products:^[2]

Major applications

• Oracle Fusion Applications
• Oracle E-Business Suite
• PeopleSoft Enterprise
• Siebel
• JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
• JD Edwards World
• Hyperion
• Master Data Management

Industry vertical applications

• ATG / Endeca branded "Oracle Commerce"
• Oracle Retail
• Micros (Retail and Hospitality, acquired post 2012)
• Primavera
• Agile
• AutoVue (for processing CAD and graphics data)^[3]

Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle's E-Business Suite (also known as Applications/Apps or EB-Suite/EBS) consists of a collection of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM) computer applications either developed or acquired by Oracle. The software utilizes Oracle's core Oracle relational database management system technology.^[4] The E-Business Suite contains several product lines often known by short acronyms.^[5]

Significant technologies incorporated into the applications include the Oracle database technologies, (engines for RDBMS, PL/SQL, Java, .NET, HTML and XML), the "technology stack" (Oracle Forms Server, Oracle Reports Server, Apache Web Server, Oracle Discoverer, Jinitiator and Sun's Java). Oracle Corporation brands the on-line technical documentation of E-Business Suite as eTRM – "E-Business Suite Technical Reference Manuals".^[6]

It makes the following enterprise applications available as part of Oracle eBusiness Suite:

• Asset Lifecycle Management
  • Asset Tracking
  • Property Management
• Customer Relationship Management
• Enterprise resource planning
  • Financial Management
  • Human Capital Management
  • Project Portfolio Management
• Procurement
  • Oracle Advanced Procurement^[7]
    • Oracle Sourcing^[8]
• Product Life-cycle Management
• Supply Chain Management^[9]
  • Supply Chain Planning
  • Logistics & Transportation Management
  • Order Management
  • Price Management
• Manufacturing
  • Discrete Manufacturing
  • Process Manufacturing

Oracle Financial Applications

The Oracle E-Business Suite provides a set of financial applications used internationally in businesses. Oracle Corporation groups these applications into "suites", which it defines as sets of common, integrated applications designed to execute specific business processes.

Oracle Financials refers to the closely related financial modules such as:

• Oracle Assets
• Oracle General Ledger
• Oracle Payables
• Oracle Receivables
• Oracle Cash Management
• Oracle Tabs

The key business processes enabled by the Financial Applications include:

• Procure-to-Pay business process flow involving activities such as procurement, purchasing, making payment to Suppliers and subsequent accounting.
• Order-to-Cash business process flow involves activities such as Customer Orders, Order fulfillment, receiving payment from Customers & subsequent accounting.^[10]

Oracle Project Portfolio Management Applications

• Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis
• Oracle Project Billing
• Oracle Project Analysis
• Oracle Daily Business Intelligence
• Oracle Project Collaboration
• Oracle Project Contracts
• Oracle Project Costing
• Oracle Project CRM
• Oracle Project Management
• Oracle Project Resource

Other

Additional Oracle E-Business Suite products include:

While there are many products mentioned in the above list they are vast in functionality too, it is highly challenging for anyone to test the entire system covering all the functionalities. The similar challenge even the internal Oracle EBS Product QA team have, they adopted the test automation as the only way to cover testing of huge amount of functionality. They use the Oracle's internal tool called "Oracle Functional Testing" of Oracle Application testing suite to automate all their business functionalities and make sure there are no regressions for every release or patch bundles they release.

Oracle Accelerate

In 2007, Oracle launched a set of applications for mid-size businesses called Oracle Accelerate. Accelerate provides access to Oracle's ERP products through a local partner-network and packages the products to meet vertical industry requirements.

Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK)

The Oracle User Productivity Kit application provides a content-development, deployment, and maintenance platform.^[12]

See also

• CEMLI
• List of acquisitions by Oracle (includes acquisitions which extended Applications portfolio)
• Oracle E-Business Suite glossary of terms

References

Further reading

• Cameron, Melanie. Oracle General Ledger Guide (2009) McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-162229-2.
• Cameron, Melanie. Oracle Procure-to-Pay Guide (2009) McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-162227-6.

External links

• Oracle Applications home page
• Oracle Applications Users Group
• Oracle Applications FAQ
• Oracle Fusion Applications