Claremont | Review of the Year | Oracle EBS Roadmap 2023

As we start a new year, I’d like to take this opportunity to send a personal “thank you” to all of Claremont’s clients and partners for their continued custom and support during 2022.

Despite the various macroeconomic headwinds, we’ve enjoyed another twelve months of growth, extending existing long-term relationships with current customers and adding to our customer portfolio by onboarding some notable new additions.

Last year was an important chapter in the Claremont story. Back in May, we were acquired by DSP-Explorer. The merger of the businesses has enabled us to expand the portfolio of services that we can offer to our respective customers, combining our applications and technology strengths with a comprehensive multi-cloud services portfolio.

Oracle Managed Services and Cloud Hosting Delivery Outcomes

Our delivery teams have had another busy year. In 2022, our award-winning Managed Services and Cloud Hosting teams processed:

6,128 Incidents
60 Problems
187 Changes

On the professional services side, with Extended Support for Oracle Database 12.1 coming to an end last summer, we’ve engaged in Oracle Database 19c upgrades for 20 customers. There have also been other notable consultancy projects completed during the year, not least a large data migration and integration project for a major pharmaceutical firm to support the harmonisation of systems following an acquisition. We’ve also seen projects where organisations are demerging from a single EBS platform, requiring migration and purging activity.

Richard Branson is famously quoted as saying:

“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.”

I’m a strong advocate of this service-profit chain philosophy that puts employee satisfaction and customer service at the heart of our ethos, which in turn has driven profitable financial growth.

We’ve continued to strive to create the very best working environment for our extremely talented team, to which we have added some exceptional new hires in the last year across the business.

We’ve received more industry recognition in this area again in the last year, winning Best Employer of the Year at the Channel Partner Insight MSP Innovation Awards for the second year running and upgrading to Better Health at Work Gold Award winners in 2022.

Outstanding Customer Satisfaction

Our customer service has been excellent, with customer satisfaction scores (measured on a monthly basis) finishing the year at an outstanding average of 9.6 out of 10 across our entire portfolio (meaning that all of these customers would recommend us to others). In over eleven years of providing managed services, we are immensely proud of our unique record of not losing a customer to a competitive service provider: evidence again that our philosophy really does work.

Together We Are Stronger

As a partner committed to the Oracle ecosystem, Claremont teamed up with four other partners, Arcivate, Fudgelearn, Innovate Tax and SplashBI, to host our inaugural Oracle5 Live event back in London back in June. The event was a great success, featuring some great contributions from many end-user organisations sharing their experiences, and was attended by over 100 delegates.

"Be The Change you Want To See In The World" - Mahatma Gandhi

Corporate social responsibility is also important to us, particularly in these challenging financial times, where some people, and the charities that help them, are really struggling. I’m delighted to report that Claremont supported 39 different national and local charities through various initiatives in 2022.

What Will 2023 bring?

Oracle E-Business (EBS) forms the back-office backbone of many large enterprises, running their essential finance, procurement, human resources, payroll and supply chain processes. Oracle has reaffirmed their long-term commitment to EBS, with Premier Support now extended to the end of 2033, including continuous product innovation.

As the economy goes through the expected rocky period ahead, whilst these systems themselves will be required, there will be a renewed focus on the cost of and value of the service delivered by the Managed Service Providers (MSPs) looking after these systems. I think we will see more organisations challenge the status quo and potentially look to the market for what is on offer.

The pool of skilled resources in EBS is also diminishing over time, so some users of the software are finding it harder to recruit and retain the necessary resources to support and evolve their systems. Again, this is where an MSP can help fill the gaps.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a steady stream of organisations migrating their EBS systems onto infrastructure cloud (one of the public clouds or our own Claremont Cloud). I expect to see this trend continue this year as organisations seek to gain some of the benefits of Cloud whilst retaining their configured and customised EBS systems that they have invested in.

Many businesses have completed the upgrade to EBS R12.2 and are now turning their attention to the ever-growing suite of Enterprise Command Centers to help deliver more value.

On a housekeeping point, something that all early adopters of R12.2 should be aware of is that Oracle has announced a new Error Correction Baseline for EBS. This impacts systems that use versions 12.2.3 – 12.2.6, and requires you to apply update patches to get to the minimum level of 12.2.7 by 1st July 2024.

The economic climate is such that the volume of acquisitions, mergers and demergers could increase this year. As I mentioned earlier, MSPs such as ourselves can provide the necessary expertise and experience to help support the migration activity for the underlying systems.

Following the success of last year’s event, Claremont and our partners are planning to bring back Oracle5 Live this summer… but bigger and better than before. Look out for further announcements in the coming months.

The coming year will also see Claremont integrate further with the wider DSP-Explorer group, aiming to provide an even more comprehensive service to all of our customers and drive future growth. It promises to be another hugely exciting year ahead!

Wishing you all a healthy, happy and successful 2023.

Choosing the Right Managed Services Provider

If you are looking for an Oracle Managed Services Provider who can help you with your Oracle support requirements, goes about it the right way, and can back up the talk, then contact us.

And if you would like to find out more about our Managed Services or have a question, you can email us at info@claremont.co.uk or phone us on +44 (0) 1483 549004.

5 Jan 2023

2022 Review Of The Year