We recently conducted a very successful webinar “Peer Advice: The Inside Story on Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite R12” in collaboration with CIO.com. One of our customers Clopay Corporation, the nation’s largest manufacturer of residential garage doors along with Oracle Corporation participated sharing their insight and experience. This webinar was very well attended with large number of CIO’s and VP’s of IT throughout North America. You can view more details at our website. A large part of the webinar was devoted to Clopay Corporation discussing their R12 upgrade journey with details on strategy, business case, execution, successes measurement and finally advises to CIOs. Oracle also updated the participants on the business benefits they will realize upgrading to R12. One of the benefits to live interactive webinars is that you can get real world feedback on the fly.

When we asked the participants “Are you planning to upgrade to Oracle EBS R12? More than 50% of the participants mentioned that they are not looking for upgrading to R12 in 2010. I was really surprised that more participants hadn’t started the upgrade planning process. There are many benefits that can be realized by upgrading. Part of the reason could be waiting for Fusion. I expect Oracle will be clearer on this path over the next few months. Companies that are starting to research their service provider will be on top of their game. An interesting next question was – What is your reason for not upgrading until now? 32% of the participants cited no in-house bandwidth as the reason with 30% not sure about ROI. This partially answered above response. Choosing a right service provider to help with your upgrade is critical – given the R12 upgrade momentum, one might want to consider moving fast to get the right attention from a provider whose capabilities fit the best. Creating an ROI can be daunting; this is where methodical approach such as Clopay’s can help in overcoming the issue. Every organization is unique – with Oracle and service provider’s help, IT leadership team can make an appropriate case with ease. I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you started your upgrade yet? If you haven’t started the upgrade what is the reason? I look forward to your feedback and thoughts on this interactive blog.