Customizations: Oracle SaaS vs PaaS

 

It has always been a questions from customer, on what's the customization extent of SaaS and where one should approach PaaS services in Oracle universe. After working into this domain for 3+ years and having multiple iterations into multiple projects and tons of pre-sales in past few years this has brought me a good level of clarity to the extent where customers are happy to know the point when they should switch to PaaS.

Understanding and practicing industry best practice should always be best practice for an organization as that helps to manage that for long run. As best systems are those which requires minimal of manual efforts to maintain.

SaaS Customizations

1. Page composer
2. OTBI reports
3. Custom Workflow - BPM

Page Composer: For certain applications one can use Page Composer to configure application page components, such as page content and layout for other users.Here are the changes one can make using this tool:

• Add, move, delete, show, and hide fields
• Add an EL expression to a field – for security control and validation
• Rearrange fields
• Change a page layout
• Modify attributes for a fellfield on a page

OTBI reports: OTBI-Oracle Transactional Business intelligence reports is one of the powerful tool by Oracle Fusion application and it has capability to desing dashboards, reports using query and outputs can be in excel, csv, text, xml, JSON and it can be accessed using a web-service and parameters of report set during designing the report.

• Real time, self-service end user reporting tool for Fusion Applications.
• Seamlessly integrated with Fusion Applications, support Fusion extentions.
• Fully leverage Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

OTBI reports are used for designing reports, dashboards and extracting data with parameters and frequency using a web service.

Custom Wokflow-BPM: A powerful tool to manage workflows in fusion applications for capturing workflows and managing the flow of a request. Oracle Fusion application technology has an inbuilt approval management system and it’s built on top of the BPM ( Business process management) Engine. With this tool oracle fusion, cloud workflows can be configured as per the business need. >b>Note: that this is only with respect to approvals and no process changes can be done.
There are various reasons we may need to modify approvals of a process like,

• AP Invoice Approval
• Journal Approvals
• Supplier Profile changes

and may want the notification actions to be executed by different users/approvers.

Oracle PaaS Platform As A Servcice, Oracle PaaS has evolved since it's on-premise days and the solutions it provides are integrative and automative in nature and keep evolving with time. Oracle PaaS has multiple service which are as below,

1. Oracle Integration Cloud, OIC
2. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI
3. Oracle Database Cloud Service, DBCS

Oracle PaaS products OIC and OCI comes into various modes of subscription and most susbscribed ones are Standard and Enterprise and go with a pricing model, Pay as you go.
Oracle Integration Cloud allows users to build integrations, applications (mobile/web) and much more into it's capabilities. And it has capability to integrate using Webservices (API: REST/SOAP), Database & Filebased.

Oracle Cloud Infra is used for hosting DBCS, hosting enterprise apps, hosting non-oracle solutions, hosting oracle on-prem solutions and currently it is being used popularly to host on-prem solutions on Oracle cloud. And this gives a major take to organizations as the end users do not have to embrace the tranformation in user accessibility.
Lastly Oracle Database Cloud Service, it acts as a backbone to OIC and OCI applications and integrations by managing data and allowing different backup mechanism and also supports automation enables services for managing databases.

A seperate article would be published on Oracle PaaS capabilities.

Thank you for adding your valuable time in going through the article.