Integration without customization for Oracle E-Business Suite

I repeatedly hear from our customers about the challenges they face in creating integrated user experiences around their investments in CRM and ERP applications.  They find themselves constrained by long release cycles, full workstacks and the expense and scarcity of skilled resources.  As a result, users have to carry on “swiveling” between applications on the desktop – bad news for the reputation of the applications and for efficiency, accuracy and costs.

Fixing this problem is a great use case for enterprise mashups, replacing complex customization projects with the much more lightweight and portable mashup process.  We call it “integration without customization”.  A while ago we announced a toolkit to be able to easily embed our mashups in the user workflow of Siebel applications; this week we have followed this up with our “extension pack” for Oracle E-Business Suite.  The pack overcomes the challenge of embedding web UI in the EBS forms UI.  By providing everything an EBS developer would need to be able to get a mashup deployed and launched within the EBS application, it cuts a task that could take many days into hours.   As a result EBS owners can extend and integrate user desktops with minimal cost and effort.

We believe integration without customisation is a killer “mashup pattern”, especially in a economy where the focus is on getting more from existing investments like major enterprise applications.  Through the rest of 2009 we will be working with our customers and partners to understand where else pre-built capabilities of this sort can smooth the process, so let us know where you see the clearest need.