Oracle South Africa is readying itself and its integrator partners for what could be an "onslaught" of upgrades to the Oracle11i environment over the next 12 months.
"We`re investing heavily in training and working hard with partners to ensure our own Professional Services Organisation can support them and provide any essential resources to meet needs beyond their capabilities," says Marc Gower, marketing director at Oracle SA.
"The next year is going be a busy one for everyone in the Oracle camp - ourselves, our partners and our customers. Now that 11i has proven itself as a robust and stable platform, interest in upgrading is growing to the point where we`re going to be hard pressed to meet what some say will become an upgrade onslaught."
Gower was responding to as recent Gartner Research Note in which it predicted that 90% of Oracle 10.7 users will upgrade to the Oracle 11i platform before June 2003 - the deadline set for ending the support for Oracle 10.7
In Research Note - Oracle AppsWorld 2002: The Game Is Called Upgrading - Gartner gives Oracle`s upgrade strategy the `thumb`s up`, saying: "We see the upgrade message, echoed by vendors, partners and clients, as a positive one."
Oracle used AppsWorld to emphasise that message, saying that the best next step is not to purchase more software, or to increase the number of licenses, but rather to migrate to 11i. Moving to 11i, it said, would eliminate the number of modifications required to the core applications, and create a much easier upgrade path for extensions to the core application.
"One of the strongest arguments for upgrading now is that it organisations will be able to run on one central database for enterprise applications, potentially reducing the costs of maintenance and providing better access to profiling information," adds Gower.
Gartner also compliments Oracle on its preparations to support its partners and customers in making the transition given the complexity of the task and the short deadline at this point.
"The message has changed from deep sales to deep delivery and upgrades. The key challenge remains migrating all of its customers from 10.7 to 11i before the June 2003 deadline. It [Oracle] is taking the right steps to accomplish that; delivery is the only critical step left," Gartner concludes.
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