Maximising utilisation within your Oracle Unlimited License agreement is essential in driving positive ROI.
But enterprises, and their corresponding Oracle deployments, are complex. As a result, it isn't unusual to find unutilised capacity of potentially beneficial Oracle technologies.
In this post we look at shelved Webcenter Portal licences and how they can be beneficially applied within an organisation with strategic digital ambitions.
Why are shelved licenses common?
Oracle's Unlimited Licence Agreements (ULAs) offer enterprises an attractive alternative to complex, case-by-case licensing. By making a prediction about its anticipated software requirements and bundling this up under a single ULA, organisations can create a software asset environment in which change can be accommodated and innovation fostered, without constant to-ing and fro-ing over individual licence costs.
But change can also work against the effective utilisation of a ULA. Changing fortunes, objectives, leadership, etc, can all affect the way in which organisations deploy their oracle licences. In a complex and increasingly virtualised world of cores, processors and clusters, it's not uncommon for them to lose track of their utilisation until something prompts an audit.
Applications for shelved portal licences
VASS IT is deeply experienced helping organisations build out innovative solutions to digital transformation, customer experience management and information management challenges on enterprise software, including Oracle's Fusion Middleware range.
On numerous occasions we've helped organisations find beneficial applications for their shelved Webcenter Portal licences. What follows are some of the most powerful that we've helped create recently.
Self-service HR portal
Maintenance of HR data is a battleground in many organisations and hundreds of man hours of valuable, highly trained HR professionals are wasted every year on data entry and administration tasks.
Self-service portals, on which employees can maintain their own employment information, can revolutionise HR data management and eradicate this wasteful problem.
Oracle WebCenter Portal is perfectly suited to the creation of added-value HR self-service platforms within organisations of any size. On an added-value platform, employees can not only update fundamental personal data, they can also interact with their HR department - recording holiday, sickness and, if necessary, timesheets, accessing payslips and other important documents and completing essential review procedures, all within one tool.
Implementing self-service HR portals can dramatically improve business resilience and agility, speeding up cumbersome manual HR processes, reducing calls to the HR department and improving data accuracy while eradicating process and data duplication throughout the organisation.
Collaboration platform
In the perpetual struggle to do more with less, to work faster and more efficiently, and to break down organisational and geographic silos, collaboration platforms hold the key to success.
As well as providing role-based, personalised access to applications, Portals can provide access to content management and social collaboration services, providing a departmental or organisation wide collaboration platform. In this guise, Portals can provide controlled access to unified voice and other collaboration features, providing fast access to knowledge and expertise, improving efficiency between teams and improving organisational transparency.
Partner Portal
Where your organisation sells via an indirect channel, helping the channel to sell should be your number one channel management priority. Partner portals play an important role in the execution of channel strategy.
Channel partners need to be able to access resources. The old way of going via the account manager for every brochure, playbook and sales tool no longer fits with needs of those doing business today. Applying your Webcenter Portals licenses to the creation of a partner portal does.
Implementing a partner portal creates a place where strategic channel management and support initiatives can be shared among all partners instantly and simultaneously. Partners can use self-service tools to access assets, streamlining the resources required to support this regular occurrence. Account managers can be then be freed up to focus on strategic deals, partner training and other high value activities.
Customer Portal
A customer portal can be thought of as new generation of website where dynamic and contextual personalisation, ecommerce functionality, social brand interaction and customer service are all possible.
Enabling customers to go deeper than just the consumption of web content offers greater opportunities to create better customer experiences, reduce customer service calls and grow customer lifetime value. Portals can support this objective by interfacing the web presentation technology of WebCenter Sites with selected business applications.
Time to deployment
Even with Webcenter Portal licenses on the shelf, the idea of implementing any of these solutions may at first glance seem like large projects in themselves. This need not be the case however. Postal ships with a whole host of readymade and reusable interface assets which can be assembled to rapidly create a working portal application. With minimal support from an experienced integrator like VASSIT, these applications can be built, tested and adapted to work perfectly with your organisation and its systems.
