Summary
In this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, host Kerry Boudreaux interviews Glenn Seninger from Oracle about the evolution and significance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). They discuss the historical context of ERP, Oracle’s legacy products, the importance of a unified platform, and the core functionalities of Oracle ERP. Glenn emphasizes Oracle’s commitment to innovation and customer success, highlighting the company’s unique three-tenet mantra: everything you need, innovation that matters, and commitment to your success.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction
02:20 The Evolution of ERP: From Past to Present
04:58 Oracle’s Legacy Products and the Fusion Evolution
09:23 The Importance of a Unified Platform
12:52 Core Functionalities of Oracle ERP
15:45 Oracle’s Three-Tenet Mantra: Everything You Need
22:03 Conclusion
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi, and welcome to today’s episode of FourthSquare Solutions Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about everything ERP. We’re going to dig into this topic of ERP enterprise resource planning with my guest, Glenn Seninger. When I talk about experience coming to the table, I can’t think of anything or anyone better to have on the show than Glenn.
Glenn, welcome to the podcast.
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Thanks for having me, Kerry.
Kerry Boudreaux
Absolutely. So Glenn, before we dig in, can you just share a little bit about your career at Oracle and the experience that you’re going to bring to us today?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Sure. Well, so I think my background is a lot like many others in the software space. I was working for a small software company in the early 90s when an Oracle recruiter reached out to me and said, did I want to join this company that I thought was pretty much a technology based company to start selling at the time ERP software. And I wasn’t even aware that Oracle had applications. This was like 1994.
And so from there, I worked as a sales rep and in various management roles. And currently, I’m responsible for our public-sector business for the western-half of the US. And so that’s my kind of my, my career in a nutshell. I’ve been with Oracle over 30 years and worked with many customers in various industries, sectors and size of companies. So this is kind of a space that I’ve grown up in. My career has been here. I enjoy it.
I love helping customers solve, their issues and challenges and working with them through the whole process. So I’ve pretty much been an ERP and an applications person my whole career.
The Evolution of ERP: From Past to Present
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, awesome. So I’m so happy to be able to bring that experience and talk about, you know, ERP, you know, with our audience today. So ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. I want to take a little bit of a drive back in time, Glenn, and before ERP was called ERP. Share with me the evolution of Enterprise Resource Planning and all the products, and we’re going to dig into what all the different areas of an organization ERP comprises of. But let’s go back in time a little bit. Before ERP was called ERP, what did it consist of and what was it called back in the day?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Well, I don’t know how old you think I am, Kerry, but I can probably take you back, at least in my career, down a couple of paths related to evolution. So, you know, from the application space, I actually was selling applications, believe it or not, in the mainframe space. And that was just at kind of the dawn of the moving away from mainframes into what we called client server computing.
And, you know, ERP has had a lot of different names. There were companies selling just financial accounting, some that sold HR payroll. but most of the industry was fairly fragmented. then in the late 80s, early 90s, companies came into the market, trying to solve really what was the most holistic challenge in the market, which is combining these various pieces together into an enterprise class solution. And of course, you know, all the players in the market now that put ERP by their name. But that’s really how the industry got started.
Oracle’s approach has been really different to the market from that perspective, because you can imagine if you have to build from the ground up these solutions, it’s very expensive, very complex. It takes a ton of engineering resources. And if your company comes out of say, one of these niche areas, it’s really hard to have the expertise across the enterprise. So that’s kind of how the industry’s evolved. Certainly now it’s mainstream. And with some of the new innovations coming into the market, like AI, machine learning and analytics, it’s really changed the way this old three letter acronym ERP, which is primarily financials, payroll, HR, manufacturing, supply chain truly evolved into kind of an enterprise platform.
Oracle’s Legacy Products and the Fusion Evolution
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so you mentioned the platform. And we’ll get into that a little bit later. There’s very few companies out there that have been around in this application space for as long as Oracle has. Let’s talk about some of the legacy products and how they came about and how they evolved into what we call the Oracle Fusion product line. How did all that happen? Because there is an evolution there,
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Well, absolutely. Depending on how far back you want to go, Oracle is obviously established in the late 70s, primarily from the database and integration perspective. And our founder, Larry Ellison, had this vision as it related to being an industry leader from a technology perspective. So as Oracle evolved, everyone knew us as a database company.
And then, in 1990, Oracle announced the launch of our first entry into the ERP world with our on-premise Oracle E-business Suite product. That product began to take foothold in the market and started to grow. Then later in our history, we had a strategy that also had us go on a pretty serious acquisition process. And so we acquired various assets across the on-premise marketplace. That was in places like logistics, transportation, planning, warehouse management. Of course, some of the most notable ones by industry included things in the retail area, utility billing, customer billing, all of those components in various industry solutions. Oracle grew as more of a portfolio company.
While we were kind of at the tail end of that acquisition approach, again, Larry had this vision that said the next evolution of computing would be done in the cloud. And at the time we didn’t call it cloud computing. I think the industry was calling it internet computing. And you may remember a little company called NetLedger. NetLedger was a Bay Area startup. It was going to take everyone’s core accounting solutions and then host them, if you will, run them on the internet with just a browser.
At the time, most large companies looked at that and said, there was no way that they were going to take their confidential information for finance, HR and payroll and let it run on with just an internet browser. Right? That doesn’t make any sense. Well, NetLedger later became NetSuite, Larry actually invested into that, personally. And, what happened from there was Oracle started its first foray.
That was a good proof-point to the industry that it was safe, it was secure, and by the way, more efficient and gave the ability for us to roll out solutions more quickly to customers. So it’s been probably about 15 years ago, we launched the first in our cloud solution called Oracle Fusion. And that was really our kind of first approach into the market.
We had this rich history from an ERP perspective through our acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion and others. So we had a really good foundation of understanding the best in class solutions we’d acquired. We took those capabilities and we put them into this next generation. Now it’s been 15 plus years and you might ask yourself, how have we done? Well, just take a look at the latest Gartner report and you can see exactly where Oracle has ranked through this evolution.
So that’s kind of a little bit of a short synopsis on kind of how we came into the on-prem space, took what we knew, and leveraged that into this new platform. Then fortunately for us, we were able to build and drive the industry’s leading solution in this broad space known as ERP.
The Importance of a Unified Platform
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome, just an excellent explanation. And a lot of people forget about NetLedger out there. And that was kind of the launch into Oracle’s cloud. So you mentioned this platform, Glenn, that everything is built on this one single platform. Can you share with the audience what that is and why it’s important to have everything built on this one platform, what we call the Oracle platform?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Sure. I think if you go back, and again this is a highly competitive space, it is filled with a lot of noise; a lot of fragmented specialized solutions. So as a customer, it can be really hard to drive through all the noise and figure out which solution is best for their organization. At Oracle, when we launched Fusion, our competitors had a lot of stones to cast at us for why were we launching yet another ERP solution when we already owned E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft. And as I mentioned, that platform approach allowed us to do a little bit, take a step back and to do a complete reset on our strategy for Fusion.
You have to remember that the Fusion solution, our cloud applications that you see today, that are running in thousands of customers across the globe, the genesis of that was we started and built these from the ground up. No longer were we trying to integrate a third-party planning and budgeting solution or trying to incorporate, you know, third-party technologies for analytics or trying to bolt on any other solutions around payroll or HR. These were all going to be Oracle source generated and own solutions.
Now, one of the things that’s kind of interesting that a lot of people forget Kerry, is part of that acquisition process. Oracle acquired a little company called Sun Microsystems. Our skeptics to our company said, why is Oracle getting in the hardware business? They don’t know what they’re doing. It seems a little bit like they’re fragmenting their strategy.
But again, Larry Ellison had a vision and a plan. And that was, in this new cloud paradigm, what if Oracle is able to own the complete stack, from the hardware layer, to the security layer, to the storage layer, to the operating system, to the database, the integration, the applications, and the analytics and reporting that sits all on this integrated stack?
If you ask me, I am always going to tell you that the integrated stack always beats best in class solutions. And the reason it does is because we’re able to roll out capabilities faster. It makes it easier for our customers. And at the end of the day, it makes it lower cost. And I think our strategy from the beginning is that Oracle is going to own the complete stack of solutions which no one else in the industry can touch.
Core Functionalities of Oracle ERP
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, and when we talk about that complete stack and that platform and all the different solutions, what’s beautiful is that Oracle listens to their customers. And if there is a gap somewhere or there’s an improvement to be made, that can happen.
So that’s what I find beautiful about this whole Oracle ecosystem of products and technology. So let’s dig in to what all does ERP encompass from functionality in different areas? Is it planning and budgeting? Is it HR? Is it supply chain? Is it all the above? From a high-level view, Glenn, what does Oracle ERP encompass?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
So if you were a customer, Kerry, and we were sitting down having this conversation in your office. You know, obviously I’d walk you through the core financial processes, G-L-A-P-A-R. Procurement ends up in kind of that broad definition of supply chain. So if you’re not a manufacturer, you’re not a distributor or retailer, obviously procurement is core purchasing.
But again, if you’re in a supply chain space, industrial manufacturing or consumer goods, we have a whole complement of supply chain solutions in that area. And then again, as I mentioned, when we built these solutions from the ground up, HR, payroll, and then the planning and budgeting components that overreach all those areas, this is the core processing for any company. Now the underlying technologies is really the story that you’re hearing a lot today.
You can’t go online, can’t watch any news story without hearing things like AI, machine learning, analytics, and so forth. So again, in hindsight, if you looked at it and said, Hey, I was trying to get into the ERP market 20 years ago, and I’m going to bolt all these pieces together. Like some of our competitors have, it takes a long time. I mean, remember we’ve been on this journey for over 15 years of bringing these solutions to market. So they’re very mature. Some of our competitors are trying to basically take their older solutions, have them hosted by somebody and calling a cloud. It’s not the same. When we talk about just core solutions within that product set, those are the pieces we’re talking about. And then this underlying technology that supports it to enable these new and enabling technologies.
Oracle’s Three-Tenet Mantra: Everything You Need
Kerry Boudreaux
Excellent, excellent insight there. So Oracle has this three-tenet mantra. I’d like to dig into it because I think it speaks really well to the overall arching differentiators that Oracle brings to the table.
The first tenet is Oracle has everything that you need. The second tenet is innovation that matters. And then the third tenet is committed to your success. Glenn, can you dig in each one of those and kind of expound on what those mean?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Yeah, again, as we’ve kind of been talking about it, I think customers and particularly CIOs and, CFOs and CEOs have been faced with this challenge of balancing the needs of their end-user base with the functional and process needs of the company. We’ve seen a lot of situations where customers, basically kind of fall into the trap of saying, “Listen, we want to make sure our users have the best solutions they need for their very specific niche areas.” That’s fine until you hand it off to the CIO and then he or she has to knit it all together in the cloud and make sure all of these things work together. Different user interfaces, different platforms, different security models, even in some cases, different hosting sites.
Again, when we talk about everything you need, Oracle’s strategy from the beginning was to address this full enterprise complement of ERP solutions under one roof. So take security, for example. If you’re trying to run an integrated security model across multiple solutions, you can imagine the difficulty and challenges it makes on a company to do that. Oracle removed all that complexity around security, because we own the stack. Hence the reason owning the stack is a big advantage.
It was funny to watch a lot of software vendors react to the AI marketplace. Again, you can’t pick up anything without hearing AI these days. How has Oracle been able to so seamlessly integrate its own AI technology into our solutions? Again, Kerry, it’s because we own the platform.
That’s been a little bit of the blessing of owning all everything you need in this world because we’re able to not only scale on our own hardware, right? When we’re talking about the deployment of all these data centers, we recently announced a large government initiative with the current administration around AI. And that initiative is being driven by our ability to scale using our own solutions.
So again, we take the burden off the customer having to worry about reporting tools, security, integration platforms, because within this ERP world, that’s what Oracle does. So the first tenet, everything you meet need, that’s kind of the piece that we’re talking about. In terms of, you want to talk about innovation that matters? That next piece, is that your next question?
Kerry Boudreaux
Absolutely. Yeah. Keep going. Good conversation.
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
I would tell you on the innovation side, again, your audience, I’m not telling them anything they don’t know. In fact, for a lot of people, they’re going to say, “These aren’t really big revelations in thought or thinking”, but we’ve all grown up in the industry knowing that the laundry list of enhancements to an on-premise environment is long. A lot of my customers had two, three, four years to wait before new enhancements rolled out in the on-prem world. Obviously in the cloud world, we as the software manufacturer, we’re now able to roll out that innovation to our customers far more efficiently. Rather than having these big forklift upgrades like we used to have in the on-prem days, we’re now able to send out updates on a quarterly basis. And our customers, the unique thing about Oracle’s rollout is that we have the ability to allow our customers to choose which of those enhancements and capabilities they absorb on a quarterly basis.
For example, if you’re looking at capabilities within supply chain and those capabilities aren’t things that you need, those are switches that you just don’t enact as part of the update. So we’re able to roll these capabilities and these innovations out to our fleet of customers on a quarterly basis, much more effectively keeping new capabilities in their hands.
I know I’ve been talking about innovations around machine learning and AI, but now that comes out with the solution. So you don’t have to worry about a separate implementation. You don’t have to worry about some of those pieces because it comes built ready with the product.
And then when we talk about committed to your success, again, that sounds a little bit like you’d expect every vendor in the industry to say, “Hey, we’re committed to your success.” But the difference is Oracle’s been there. We’ve done it. It’s not like you were going to be customer one. We have helped thousands of customers through this journey, whether you’re migrating from E-Business Suite or JD Edwards or PeopleSoft. We’ve migrated thousands upon thousands of customers through this process. So, who better to lead you through that process than the company that’s taken care of your business for many years?
So again, when you talk about everything you need, innovation that matters and committed to your success, those are really the three pillars that we go in and try to help customers as we’re helping them through this journey to the cloud. Does that help?
Conclusion
Kerry Boudreaux
No, it was excellent. That certainly helps. So Glenn, I want to thank you for your time today. And for the folks that are tuning in, thank you for joining us. Thank you for your time.
My name’s Kerry Boudreaux and we’ll be back in two weeks. And until then, from all of us here at the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, keep asking yourself, how can you transform your business through technology and innovation?
Glenn Seninger – Oracle
Thanks, Kerry.
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. Great job, Glenn.
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