Oracle E-Business Suite is packaged as one large suite of products irrespective of which products a customer has bought or licensed. There is a history behind this.
In the past, up until early releases of 11i, Oracle used to build, test and ship product Family Packs (FP) i.e, Financials, Manufacturing, Projects, CRM, Healthcare, HR to name a few. Customers had the ability to selectively install the FPs that mattered to them. In providing this ability the Oracle application development teams, from each of the individual product families, took the onus of identifying the dependencies and testing the various configurations the customers could potentially have the suite installed in. Despite their best efforts to identify, document all the dependencies and thousands of plsql package stubs shipped to ensure that the product installed and worked, the installation was still fraught with issues. The challenge only got worse with the expansion of the EBS functional footprint across Manufacturing, CRM, Projects, HR.
Finally Oracle decided (rightfully so) to ship the entire suite and thereby eliminated this wasteful exercise of testing all the possible configurations, redundant stubs being shipped etc. It was a trade-off between additional storage costs vs potential instability caused due to application dependencies. With storage costs rapidly going down customers did not seem to complain. Oracle on its part, seems to have got it right, based on the results of subsequent releases, as the chinks in installation seem to have disappeared in the later versions of 11i.
About Subraya Mallya
Subraya Mallya is a technology executive, entrepreneur involved in conceiving, building software businesses. In this blog, he focusses on business and technology strategies around Business Model, Product Development and Marketing. Connect with me on Twitter - @subrayamallya
May 10th, 2007 at 1:07 AM
Subraya
What you are saying is true but at the same time, Oracle still gives the customers an opportunity to upgrade at family pack levels as well. Many customers do not want to upgrade entire suite due to efforts involve in testing all of the applications. Oracle still provides family packs to cater to scenarios where customers only upgrades to Financials family pack on top of 11.5.10. In addition, as most of us are familiar with, Oracle also provides one off patches for critical issues for each product.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:10 AM
Vikas
Your are absolutely right when it comes to upgrades/updates. Once the customer has installed the entire Oracle EBS suite, upgrades from thereon can be done selectively (as long as the pre-requisites/dependencies are addressed).
Subraya Mallya