Users to quiz Oracle on Financials? future

Database manufacturer?s upgrade plans for application suite raises concerns about migration among its European users

Members of the European Oracle User Group are flying to Los Angeles in the next two weeks to raise concerns with COO Ray Lane about upgrade paths for the supplier?s Financials applications .

Most European customers use version 10.4 of the application suite, yet may be forced to migrate to later versions before they are ready.

Release 10.6 is scheduled to go into maintenance from September 1998, but users will need to make another major migration, from 10.7, which is year 2000-compliant, to version 11, which supports European monetary union. However, analysts have claimed that version 11 has been delayed from the end of this year to the first quarter of next year because of technical problems.

Clive Walker, chairman of the Oracle user group, said: ?We are concerned about what upgrade path there is going to be. Most of our users are still running 10.4, but there will be quite a lot of work involved in moving to 10.7. It will potentially involve months of effort, and there?s a reluctance to do that if we are going to have to move to version 11 soon afterwards.?

He added that the user group was also concerned about support being discontinued for version 10.6 in September next year, because users saw no reason to move to 10.7 until closer to the year 2000.

Dennis Keeling, consultant and chairman of the Business & Accounting Software Developers? Association, also voiced concern over version 11 of Oracle Financials, claiming that the supplier was facing technical problems with the offering because it has been designed to support Windows rather than traditional character-based terminals ? a change that will make migration even more expensive for users.

But Ian Richardson, technical manager for UK applications at Oracle, said: ?We will no longer provide code patches for version 10.4 from the end of this calendar year, and will only offer support, but a significant number of people have upgraded to 10.7 already. I am not aware of any performance or scalability issues in version 11.?