“It’s exciting to be working toward a win-win outcome. You’re on the front
line; you’ll always be able to say you’re one of the first.”
—James Donley, Vice President and CIO, Ciena
THE EARLY-ADOPTER EXPERIENCE
The Sierra Atlantic team has worked with Ciena over several
years, which helped the consultants deeply understand how
Ciena’s business processes worked. With an experienced
partner involved, it made sense for Ciena to join with Oracle
and Sierra Atlantic in the second half of 2008 and engage in
other codevelopment opportunities. “The dedication, focus,
and resource attention from the Oracle side has been very
significant,” Donley says.
Most of the team coordination was handled by Sierra
Atlantic to ensure that everyone was up-to-date on the
progress and ready to take on their own supporting tasks.
The Agile, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Application
Integration Architecture, and Oracle Fusion Middleware
teams were all involved to ensure that the PIP being implemented worked in a range of scenarios. “Patience has to be
involved,” Donley says. “At the same time, it’s exciting to
both be working toward a win-win outcome. You’re on the
front line; you’ll always be able to say you’re one of the first
to develop the product, let alone adopt it.”
Every customer is different when it comes to business
process integration, and prebuilt PIPs may not be right for
every situation. They work best when the systems to be
connected are fundamentally standardized. Sierra Atlantic’s
engagement at Ciena included cleaning up the Agile and
Oracle E-Business Suite installations to ensure that this was
the case. “While the process integration pack is not necessarily going to include all the companies’ processes, the
customer should be open to change if there is a value,” says
Lawrence Pravin, leader of Oracle Application Integration
Architecture solutions at Sierra Atlantic. “Even though we
make money by building custom components for companies
like Ciena, we don’t necessarily blindfold the customer on
benefits and the risks associated with standardization.”
BENEFITS FOR EARLY BIRDS
Donley and company were often pleased to have technical
backup to argue for a more-standardized approach with the
corporate users. “Having a tool that you can say supports the
vanilla approach is more ammunition for us as an IT organization to try and keep our customer base aligned to an out-of-the-box solution,” Donley says.
The improved integration has benefits for the business
beyond greater reliability. As Ciena’s Temple points out, a
stronger integration through the PIP should give Ciena more
capabilities for managing its data. “It’s actually going to open
up some new possibilities for us of data elements being sent
between the two systems,” he says.
Ciena’s work with Oracle also strengthens Oracle’s exper-
tise in industry business practices, helping Oracle to improve
products and customer support.
Temple says Ciena will benefit over the long term because
Oracle is learning so much about its industry. “The more business knowledge we give them about our particular industry
or subindustry, the more we think it will help them take those
requirements into account in future designs of the product,”
he says. “We like making them more knowledgeable in our
business domain.”
THE THRILL OF THE NEW
Ciena’s Donley is happy with how the Agile Product
Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for Oracle
E-Business Suite for Design to Release implementation has
progressed. He and his staff have learned more about how
their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system works so
they can provide better support to the salespeople, engineers, and financial managers at Ciena. By leveraging the
Agile Product Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for
Oracle E-Business Suite for Design to Release process, Ciena
has also been gaining flexibility, increasing efficiencies
through end-to-end integrations, and lowering its overall
cost of ownership. And, PIPs are addressing needs that ERP
users have had for decades.
“It’s exciting always getting into the newer areas when
you are primarily the first company to build this kind of an
innovative product,” says Sierra Atlantic’s Pravin. “The experience of working with some of the early adopters, getting
their mind share, and exchanging our ideas and thoughts
really excites us.”
Ciena’s team members were happy to have a long-term
problem solved. And Donley, a longtime Oracle customer at
Ciena and elsewhere, found Oracle executives at the highest
levels of the company attending to his needs. “I literally
showed up—one among many hundreds of CIOs—had a
concern, and it was addressed.”<>
ANN C. LOGUE is the author of Socially Responsible Investing for Dummies (Wiley,
2009). She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Oracle Application Integration Architecture
oracle.com/aia
Oracle E-Business Suite
oracle.com/goto/ebs
Agile product lifecycle management solutions
oracle.com/goto/agile
