I remember attending my first Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) conference in 1999. I believe this was the year that Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, declared that the internet would change everything. The use of the internet in everyday business life was in full swing at that time and the dot.com boom was roaring with start ups in 90% of all garages in the bay area (slight exaggeration...), some of which had turned into enormously successful corporations. Indeed the internet has changed life throughout the world. Most of us arc just as lost without internet access as wc arc without our cell phones.
The advent and evolution of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have had and are still having almost as significant an impact on organizations as the internet has had on the individual. ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle’s suite of products (E-Business Suite (EBS), PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, Hyperion, Fusion, etc) continue to cause a dramatic change in business and IT processes.