Oracle is telling customers that the future of its HR platform will be in the cloud. It’s trying to do this without alarming users who host its applications internally.
Users of on-premises PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite HR system users won’t be abandoned as cloud use grows, Oracle promises. These systems will get regular updates and new features. There’s no end-of-life risk, said Mark Hurd, Oracle’s CEO. “No worries about that,” he said.
Even with that, however, Oracle’s cloud-basedHuman Capital Management(HCM) system will see many more new features and will pull ahead in capability over on-premises systems, said Hurd.
“The trajectory of new features coming into the cloud product is going not linear, but it’s going like this,” said Hurd, gesturing sharply upward. This was at a meeting with analysts and press at an Oracle conference this week in Boston. Hurd believes a “majority” of its customers will be on the cloud platform within five years.
Some of the new cloud-specific features include chatbot capabilities. “It’s one way to interact with a core HR system without having to go into anything — you’re already in your phone, in chat,” said Bertrand Dussert, vice president of HCM transformation and thought leadership at Oracle. Cloud-based machine learning will provide, for instance, targeted training recommendations to employees, he said.
One problem users face with HR upgrades is they are not necessarily an easy sell to C-level executives. Hurd acknowledges as much. ERP and CRM upgrades may deliver “hard benefits,” or revenue improvements, while HR systems tend to yield “softer benefits,” he said.
Even though Oracle argues that a move to its HR cloud will give users more features at less cost, the shift isn’t simple.
Users at Oracle’s HCM Cloud Conference said they had to hire system integrators, such as Grant Thornton and PricewaterhouseCoopers, to help with the cloud migration. They cited ROI of three or four years.
In some cases, IT triggers were behind these cloud migrations. Users had fallen behind in on-premises HR releases and/or needed a hardware refresh.
Growth and acquisitions put Emerson in a position of supporting two Oracle HR platforms — PeopleSoft and the E-Business Suite — said James Rhodes, vice president of HR information systems at Emerson, an electric equip
