Safeguarding Information
Continued
"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 Recognizing that without significant upgrades, it was a barrier to rapid growth, the company replaced the outdated system with Oracle applications that supported its ambitious business goals.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 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."
Making Agile a Better Product
Fjeldheim is confident that the Agile system'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 bringing 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."
For More Information
Oracle and Agile
Molly Rose Teuke is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology.
