product information, providing a foundation
for greater configurability and personalization by users. That makes life easier for
everyone involved in initial development
stages, and it helps manage and track steps
in Qualcomm’s formal release process,
from engineering prototype to production.
It has also enabled Qualcomm to develop
an efficient change management protocol
within that process. The ensuing transparency in the change process is a huge
benefit. As Fjeldheim points out, “We now
have the ability to cut in changes at the
right time, taking scheduling and workflow
into account so key people involved in the
process are able to see changes easily and approve them in a
timely manner.”
>>SNAPSHOT
Qualcomm
www.qualcomm.com
Headquarters: San Diego,
California
Oracle products and services:
Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle
Management, Agile Software
Development Kit; Oracle E-Busi-
ness Suite; Oracle’s PeopleSoft
Enterprise; Oracle Fusion Middle-
ware; Oracle Database 10g
we are certainly using its out-of-the-box
functionality, we do have quite a number of
customizations driven by our own specific
needs,” says Fjeldheim. “The Agile software
development kit has enabled us to develop
extensions that address processes not supported by the vanilla version. We’ve also
been able to integrate custom Web applications to support those processes while
leveraging the Agile system as the product
record source without having to maintain or
control the information in multiple sources.”
ONE LESS INFRASTRUCTURE
Fjeldheim anticipates that Oracle’s acquisition of Agile will
increase the software’s value to his company. Qualcomm runs
its Agile software on IBM WebSphere while maintaining Oracle
Fusion Middleware in the Oracle Fusion environment. “If we
could put that all on one infrastructure, that’s one less infrastructure I would have to maintain,” he says. “From an IT perspective, that reduces my development and maintenance costs
and cuts out my WebSphere licensing fees. Intuitively, I would
guess that we would see approximately a 25 percent reduction in our cost structure.” Plus, a single infrastructure means a
single user interface, and that translates to even greater savings
in the form of reduced training costs.
Another benefit will be improvements in data integration
between the Agile Product Lifecycle Management environment and Oracle’s manufacturing environment. Too often, says
Fjeldheim, differences in formatting result in failed integration,
necessitating detective work and manual corrections before a
new product gets into production. That process can take one
week or more, depending on the problem’s complexity. Given
the implications of time to market for profitability, failures in
data integration can be quite costly.
“I expect that Oracle will fix this problem fairly quickly, and
that’s going to have a big impact for us,” says Fjeldheim. His
optimism is rooted in his experience with previous Oracle acquisitions. In 2001 Qualcomm was running heavily customized
enterprise resource planning software that had become increasingly costly and ineffective. Recognizing that without significant
upgrades, it was a barrier to rapid growth, the company replaced
the outdated system with Oracle applications that supported
its ambitious business goals. “An important component of the
success of that implementation was our close partnership with
Oracle,” Fjeldheim says. “Oracle worked with us to develop
additional functionality in released products, reducing the need
for custom development.”
In its Agile implementation, Qualcomm has realized significant benefits with a lower ongoing cost of ownership. “Although
MAKING AGILE A BETTER PRODUCT
Fjeldheim is confident that the Agile sys-
tem’s value will only increase with Oracle in the picture. “There’s
a long list of things that we and other customers were requesting
of Agile that were on its to-do list, but it lacked the R&D dollars
to do it all. Now the Agile people are going to have access to a
lot more money and resources to do things that will make Agile
Product Lifecycle Management a better product. As soon as this
acquisition was announced, I had people at Agile contacting me,
saying, ‘What would be the first thing you would want to have
us work on at Oracle?’ and I had their counterparts at Oracle
asking me the same thing. When Oracle acquires a company, it
makes my job a lot easier, because I don’t have to try to build in
new functionality I need. We work with Oracle and say, ‘This is
important,’ and it shows up in the next product release. When
Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, it did a really good job of bring-
ing people over and making them feel welcome. As far as I can
tell, the most-talented PeopleSoft people have stayed with the
company and are in key leadership roles, where I continue to
work with them. I expect the same thing to happen with Agile.”
Fjeldheim predicts that the results of this acquisition will be
especially beneficial to companies that use both Agile and Oracle
but notes that the increased R&D capacity will be advantageous even to companies that are currently using only the Agile
software. “Customers of the Agile product line will want to start
talking to Oracle, incorporating Oracle’s plans for Agile into
their own plans,” he says. “They need to look for opportunities
to consolidate and leverage technologies to bring costs down.
It’s going to be different for every company, because they’ll have
different tools, technologies, and strengths, but Oracle has been
very good about supporting existing product lines and existing releases so that customers don’t have to rush to migrate and
upgrade just because of the acquisition. They can do it within
their own time frame, not Oracle’s, and that gives everybody
plenty of time to figure out what this means to them.” <>
MOLLY ROSE TEUKE is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology.
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Oracle and Agile
