The official word is that Oracle’s E-Business Suite release 12.1 will be delivered in 2009. But Oracle product managers say some or all of it could arrive sooner rather than later.
“It looks like the winter,” John Olszewski, senior development director, said during a briefing Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.
Oracle says the suite offers nine new products and enhancements in supply chain, CRM, human-resources and service-request modules. It updates release 12, which was delivered 18 months ago.
“I’d have to kill you or me,” after conveying the exact date, Jon Chorley, an Oracle vice president, said at the event. The official date, he said, is 2009.
Oracle said the nine new products include: Price Protection, for managing price discounting; Landed Cost Management, for tracking transportation costs; and Supplier Ship & Debit, for calculating how price changes impacts the distribution channel.
Additional products, some of which are already available separately, collect data from the factory floor to measure equipment effectiveness, determine the profitability of business deals, and manage remote locations, such as retail stores.
While many seem incremental, Oracle said the goal of 12.1 is to significantly improve areas of the suite that didn’t get the attention core financials did in release 12.
Improvements in 12.1 also bring some Web 2.0 capabilities. In human resources, for instance, an enhancement lets managers maintain of pool of job candidates in a social network style app.
Some notable improvements come to the services module, where new capabilities allow managers to track the costs of services requests. “This was a gap” in the earlier release, said Sanjeev Sahni, a director of product management.
