Not content with merely transforming the world’s largest industry, integrating Cerner, and competing with some of the world’s fastest-growing and most successful companies, Larry Ellison is now planning for Oracle to overhaul the world of B2B commerce.
For more on Oracle’s plans for healthcare overall and Cerner in particular, please see
Oracle to Become World’s Fastest-Growing Major Cloud Provider With Cerner.
Plus, you can hear the latest insights from Oracle on its industry-specific initiatives from Oracle Industries executive vice-president Mike Sicilia and others at Cloud Wars Expo
in San Francisco on June 28-29-30.
Now, while Oracle’s assault on the antiquated technologies and processes of the B2B commerce world might not match the scale of its effort to revolutionize the healthcare business, it nonetheless represents yet another effort by Ellison to pit Oracle’s unique set of resources and energy against a major sector of the economy that has fallen badly behind the times.
Ellison’s plan centers on the rising fortunes of Oracle’s Fusion ERP application and its ability to coordinate large volumes of data in near real-time across various organizations. The strategy also involves the deep involvement of Oracle’s Financial Services Cloud, major banks, and logistics companies.
Here’s how Ellison described it during Oracle’s June 13 earnings call:
“In our Financial Services vertical, we’re working with major money-center banks and leading logistics companies to automate B2B commerce from directly within the Oracle ERP Cloud. For example, when a hospital wants to buy an X-ray machine, that hospital simply enters a purchase request for the X-ray machine into their Oracle ERP procurement system,” Ellison said.
“That procurement system then sends that order directly to the Oracle ERP order-management system at one of the companies selling X-ray machines and automatically originates a corresponding loan request from that hospital’s preferred bank. The company selling the X-ray machine uses their Oracle ERP order-management system to check product availability and submit a shipping request to their preferred logistics provider so it can automatically quote a delivery date to the buyer.”
I’m no procurement or B2B commerce expert, but I didn’t catch a lot of human-to-human interaction in that sequence — and that is the entire point behind Ellison’s idea. “The entire B2B commerce process is automated within the Oracle Cloud: purchasing, selling, loan origination, shipping, billing, and payments,” said Ellison, calling this proposed automation of B2B commerce “yet another huge opportunity for Oracle.”
“We already have over 30,000 cloud ERP customers, including many of the world’s most important banks and leading logistics companies.”
This is an idea that Ellison has been surfacing over Oracle’s past few earnings calls, but he spoke about it this week in a greater level of detail than at any time in the past. Plus, when viewed in parallel with the company’s integration of Cerner and its sweeping plans for overhauling healthcare technology, processes, and outcomes, the B2B commerce moves clearly show Oracle’s aggressive rotation toward industry-specific solutions.
And at the front of that advance is the healthcare initiative, as I explore in Larry Ellison’s Healthcare Transformation: Oracle Makes Biggest Bet Ever. But for the restless Ellison, there are plenty of other new and/or related adventures to pursue as well — and B2B commerce is squarely on Oracle’s extensive to-do list.
Such is life in the Cloud Wars, where innovation, exploration, acceleration, and growth rule.
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