Hello Oracle Cloud User,
Since we launched Oracle SaaS (Fusion), we have worked tirelessly to ensure our cloud strategy meets and exceeds your expectations. Oracle Cloud adoption is increasing at a record pace; therefore, we would like to provide you with an update on recent progress.
1. Release 13 Focus
Release 13 of Oracle Cloud Applications is a significant release achieving two key milestones: new cloud products & user experience and a streamlined software development process.
- R13 includes many new cloud products focused on Supply Chain Management and Customer Experience
plus a new User Interface:
- Supply Chain Management — Introduced 436 new features and six new products covering sales and operation planning, demand management, supply planning, collaboration, quality management, and maintenance. These new products are designed to help customers create intelligent, connected, and customer-centric supply chains by aligning internal activity and improving collaboration between suppliers and manufacturers.
- Customer Experience — Extended the Oracle CX Cloud Suite with the introduction of Oracle Engagement Cloud, which combines sales and service capabilities to help organizations increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and up-sell opportunities. It enriches the customer experience by bridging the gap between sales and customer service.
- User Interface — Not only did we overhaul the UI design and add more visualizations to produce a more modern look and feel, but we also simplified workflows by removing unnecessary steps.
- While creating Release 13 we re-engineered and dramatically streamlined the software development process to converge on a single, managed code line in the cloud. Oracle's designers and developers are able to accelerate the delivery of innovation to our customers, resulting in more functionality, available sooner, on a predictable schedule.
2. Communication
- Oracle issued a Cloud Applications Press Release (link) announcing the availability of Oracle Cloud Applications Release 13. This further extends the industry's broadest, deepest, and fastest growing suite of cloud applications.
- Oracle published an SCM-Focused Press Release (link) highlighting new innovations that enhance the user experience and support demand-driven business models with modern, end-to-end supply chain best practices.
- Oracle published Readiness Material (link) on cloud.oracle.com which describes new features delivered in R13.
- In addition, Oracle published R13 Documentation (link) on Oracle Help Center.
3. Availabilty, Cadence, and Consumption
Availability
- Due to the unprecedented level of R13 innovation – many new products, 1,224 new features, a new software development/release process – coupled with our goal to deliver the highest quality cloud applications to our customers, we are moving at a measured pace.
- The target date to complete the upgrade scale out and begin the bulk upgrade to R13 is February 2018. You should receive an invitation to schedule your upgrade in December.
Cadence
- The previous release plan for Oracle Cloud Applications was two scheduled releases per year.
- The plan for Release 13 and future releases incorporates four quarterly updates.
- In addition, a set of release readiness or “preview” material is published on the cloud.oracle.com site even sooner. This material provides a preview of new and updated functionality coming in the next release to help you understand and plan.
Easy to Consume
- As new functionality is steadily introduced into your environment; it is done in a non-disruptive way.
- That is, new functionality is delivered disabled or turned off. You choose when to enable and begin leveraging as it fits into your schedule. Plus, new feature enablement is as simple as using a wizard-based tool to activate and configure.
- Overall, this approach is sensitive to your business needs and minimizes any operational disruption.
4. Terminology
To be more consistent with established cloud terminology, we are adjusting our versioning. Because Release 13 will have quarterly functional revisions, we will begin versioning Oracle Cloud Applications as follows:
Example:
- Oracle Sales Cloud R13 (update 17B)
- Oracle Sales Cloud R13 (update 17C)
- Oracle Sales Cloud R13 (update 17D)
The number 17 represents the calendar year. A,B,C,D represents the first, second, third, or fourth quarterly revision in that calendar year. One time note: there is no R13 update 17A as the initial R13 introduction fell into the 2nd calendar or B quarter.
In addition, the monthly update, previously known as Patch Bundle, will be renamed to Maintenance Pack.
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