Mark BurgessIn an era where agility, integration, and innovation define enterprise success, Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) continues to demonstrate its strategic value. Far from being a legacy platform, modern EBS offers enterprise-grade stability while unlocking new opportunities in automation, extensibility, AI-driven intelligence, and cloud transformation.
For many enterprises, the idea of modernising core ERP functions often conjures images of costly, disruptive, and high-risk transformation projects. Replacing an entire ERP landscape is no small task – it demands significant investment, long timelines, and introduces considerable operational risk.
At the same time, with the spotlight focused on next-generation SaaS platforms and AI-powered applications, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Oracle EBS already supports many of these modern capabilities. From cloud automation and secure integration to low-code extensions and AI-driven intelligence, EBS has quietly evolved into a platform that can compete with the latest innovations – without requiring a full reimplementation.
The reality? Modernising EBS using today’s technologies provides a low-risk, high-value path to innovation – one that builds on existing investments rather than replacing them.
This article explores how IT leaders can reimagine their EBS environment—not by starting over, but by evolving to meet the demands of a digital-first enterprise.
Our Take
Modernising EBS in place allows organisations to extend the value of their existing ERP investments—without the cost and disruption of reimplementation.
If your business processes are working, there is no need to re-engineer them. You can modernise your infrastructure, integrate new capabilities, and secure long-term support without starting over.
Stability with Strategic Depth
Oracle EBS has earned its place as the operational backbone for countless global enterprises. In its latest releases, EBS delivers an incredibly stable and mature environment—battle-tested, feature-rich, and capable of supporting the most demanding 24×7 business operations.
The current EBS releases are built on a robust, feature-rich technology stack – arguably the most stable in the platform’s 25-year history.
With Premier Support extended through 2036 (and likely beyond), organisations can modernise in place, knowing the platform has long-term viability and continued Oracle investment. EBS now offers tight, secure integration with Oracle Fusion SaaS applications, enabling a hybrid model where businesses can adopt best-of-breed cloud functionality while retaining the core strength of their EBS platform.
Key strategic advantages include:
- Long-term ROI and enhanced value from existing license estates and support contracts.
- Reduced risk with a proven, resilient technology stack.
- Confidence in ongoing compliance and functional updates across the Oracle tech stack.
- A broad range of modernisation options across technology, integration and UX.
Historically, EBS upgrades were complex and resource-intensive. With EBS 12.2’s annual release updates and online patching, most EBS updates are now applied with minimal downtime – enabling innovation via adopting the latest application releases far more manageable.
Our Take
We have found current EBS software releases to be very stable – Oracle Database 19c and Oracle EBS 12.2. This provides an excellent platform to innovate on where the technology “just works” without having to battle with new, unproven tech. It also provides confidence that the latest software releases and innovations can be adopted quickly and easily into the platform.
Operational Efficiency through Automation
Supporting Oracle EBS has traditionally required specialised skills and significant manual effort. Today, automation tools offer a step-change in efficiency, enabling IT teams to simplify EBS administration and significantly reduce operational costs and effort.
From patching and backups to provisioning and cloning, key tasks can now be executed programmatically using automation tools or cloud utilities.
Modern capabilities include:
- Automated patching and cloning for OCI-hosted and on-prem environments.
- Lifecycle automation with EBS Cloud Manager for EBS in OCI.
- Integrated monitoring via Oracle and third-party tools.
- Database lifecycle automation using DB Base tooling in OCI.
Crucially, these benefits extend beyond the cloud. Many lifecycle operations are easily automated for on-premise EBS as well.
Our Take
While maintenance tasks still require runtime, the hands-on time and effort has dropped dramatically. This translates directly into lower support costs and higher IT productivity.
EBS support has fundamentally changed. Instead of large, risky upgrades spaced years apart, modern EBS enables frequent, low-risk, automated changes—with minimal admin overhead.
Seamless Integration Across the Enterprise
In today’s connected enterprise, integration is essential—and Oracle E-Business Suite delivers a robust and versatile set of tools to connect with both Oracle and non-Oracle systems. These capabilities allow IT teams to build intelligent, automated workflows that leverage EBS capability as a source of truth within the broader digital ecosystem.
Key integration technologies include:
- Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC): A powerful middleware platform offering process orchestration and a library of pre-built adapters, including many for seamless integration between EBS, Oracle Fusion SaaS and a wide range of external applications and data sources.
- REST APIs and Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS): Lightweight, modern interfaces for secure, real-time communication with EBS data—ideal for extending and exposing integration points.
- Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG): Enables the publishing and consumption of web services within EBS, leveraging Oracle Workflow and XML Gateway to facilitate structured data exchange.
- Event-Driven Architecture: EBS can emit business events consumed by modern systems, enabling real-time integration and responsiveness across platforms.
- Traditional Interfaces: Oracle EBS continues to support flat file and SQL/PLSQL-based interfaces—familiar, proven approaches still widely used for batch and legacy processing.
Our Take
Modern integration platforms make working with EBS easier and faster. Tools like OIC reduce development time with prebuilt connectors, while ORDS offers powerful flexibility for custom APIs.
Legacy options like flat files and PL/SQL still work—and combining them with modern integration approaches enables a truly hybrid integration strategy.
Enterprise-Grade Identity Management
Identity and access control are foundational pillars of enterprise security. OCI IAM provides a low-cost, enterprise-grade solution for managing access to EBS.
Benefits include:
- Cloud-native implementation via OCI identity domains.
- Built-in integration with Microsoft IAM platforms (AD, ADFS, Entra ID).
- Oracle Apps Premium Identity Domains for a lower-cost entry point.
- Seamless support for 2FA when SSO is enabled.
This approach eliminates the complexity and expense of deploying an on-prem Oracle IAM stack along with and simplifying enterprise-wide identity integration.
Our Take
Implementing SSO and 2FA for EBS using Oracle OCI IAM is a practical way to increase security while reducing complexity and administrative overhead.
This approach provides a scalable, cost-effective alternative to deploying a full on-premise Oracle IAM stack—especially when integrating with Microsoft identity platforms.
Extendability with Oracle APEX
Oracle APEX provides a modern, low-code application development platform tightly integrated with Oracle EBS. It allows developers to innovate within the EBS ecosystem without being limited by traditional EBS development tools.
Recent enhancements include:
- Native integration with EBS security models.
- Native APEX app embedding within the EBS user interface – users no longer have to “navigate” to a separate application.
- AI assisted APEX application development to reduce development lead times.
- Support for online patching for APEX applications.
Oracle APEX opens new paths for delivering modern, user-friendly UIs and business apps that extend the functionality of EBS. It’s native ability to publish and consume REST APIs also makes it a strong asset for integrated digital workflows.
Our Take
Oracle APEX provides a fast, flexible path to modernise and extend EBS. Its ability to integrate with EBS security and native UI makes it a powerful tool for innovation.
We’re especially excited about APEX’s native support for REST APIs, which opens up even more integration opportunities.
Introducing AI to Oracle EBS
Select AI brings conversational access to Oracle EBS data. By integrating Oracle APEX, Autonomous Database and EBS, organisations can allow users to interact with EBS using natural language queries.
Use cases include:
- Interrogating EBS data through natural language interfaces.
- Embedding smart search and dynamic insights into business UIs.
- Enabling self-service analytics for business users.
These capabilities are supported for EBS cloud and on-prem deployments—enabling innovation without requiring data migration.
Our Take
EBS built-in integration with OCI generative AI services can revolutionise how EBS is used within the organisation. It will be interesting to see how developments in this space pan out when using AI agents across EBS and SaaS hosted applications.
Oracle’s approach to bring AI capabilities to EBS data will provide many opportunities to innovate that may not have been possible otherwise.
OCI: The Future-Proof Home for Oracle EBS
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is engineered for enterprise workloads like EBS. It provides scalable, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure with deep integration options.
Key components include:
- DB Base and Exadata Cloud Services (ExaCS) for database hosting.
- WebLogic UCM images for flexible mid-tier deployment.
- EBS Cloud Manager for automated lifecycle operations.
- Built-in OCI security stack with support for Data Safe and Unified Auditing and SQL Firewall in Oracle Database 23ai.
- Direct integration with Oracle Analytics, Integration Cloud, and Oracle Fusion SaaS.
OCI supports both lift-and-shift and hybrid deployments—allowing you to run EBS within a modern infrastructure while keeping critical enterprise data within Oracle’s cloud ecosystem.
EBS Cloud Manager provides fully automated provisioning and lifecycle management for EBS environments running in Oracle Cloud. EBS CM significantly reduces the overhead involved in deploying and supporting Oracle EBS.
Our Take
Taking advantage of OCI capabilities to run EBS opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Without question OCI provides game-changing capabilities to further enhance innovation, reduce cost, increase performance and system security for EBS.
Final Thoughts
Modernising Oracle EBS with today’s tools and technologies transforms it from a legacy core into a flexible, future-ready platform.
EBS is not a dead end—it’s a springboard. With Oracle’s continued investment, IT leaders have every reason to build on it.
