Automation: Transforming Oracle Cloud ERP from a Technical Upgrade to a Critical Business Platform
Why Should You Automate Oracle ERP after moving to the Cloud..?
Written by Independent Journalist Pat Brans, featuring expert input from:
Swathi Adimulam
OCI Cloud & AI Architect, Oracle
Martin Hulbert
Chief Technology Officer, Ignite Technology
For many enterprises, migrating Oracle ERP to the cloud is treated as the finish line of digital transformation. In practice, it is often the beginning of a new operational challenge. Years of carefully tuned on-premises scripts, manual controls, and tribal knowledge do not automatically survive the move to cloud platforms. What emerges instead is a modern ERP core that is technically cloud-hosted—but operationally brittle.
“That gap between migration and true modernisation
is where automation becomes decisive.“
“Cloud migration unlocks operational agility and AI-driven innovation, enabling a level of competitive edge that legacy systems simply cannot sustain,” says Swathi Adimulam, OCI Cloud & AI Architect at Oracle. “To truly capitalise on these gains, firms must move beyond ‘lift and shift’ and embrace cloud-native automation to eliminate the manual risks of the past.”
Why Automation Becomes Urgent Post-Migration
On-premises Oracle ERP environments were typically run as stable back-office systems. Processes were predictable, integrations were limited, and downtime was often scheduled. Cloud changes that equation. ERP suddenly becomes part of a larger, event-driven ecosystem that includes SaaS platforms, analytics pipelines, AI workloads, and multi-region deployments.
According to Adimulam, the strategic value of cloud ERP only materialises when automation is treated as a first-class capability. High availability, disaster recovery, rolling upgrades, and security validations are no longer exceptional events—they must happen continuously, and often simultaneously.
“In the cloud, you don’t patch a system once a quarter,” she explains. “The underlying hardware, hypervisors, and managed services (like Object Storage buckets) are constantly patched, often without you ever knowing it happened. That can only work if it’s automated and repeatable.”
“The strategic value of cloud ERP only materialises
when automation is treated as a first-class capability.”
Automation also underpins multi-cloud flexibility. Once on cloud, it’s possible to integrate with other cloud providers, selecting best-of-breed capabilities from each. Without orchestration, those integrations quickly become fragile point-to-point connections.
One of the most underestimated phases of ERP modernisation is the critical period right before go-live, when infrastructure may be running in the cloud but data synchronisation, application validation, and traffic cutovers still pose significant risk.
Adimulam describes a framework of orchestrated modernisation, where, infrastructure provisioning is automated first, ensuring environments can be recreated consistently across development, testing, and production. Application deployment and validation follow, using automated test suites to confirm that business processes behave as expected in the new architecture. Only then does traffic switch over, often gradually, with rollback mechanisms built in.
“One of the most underestimated phases of ERP
modernisation is the critical period right before go-live.”
For high-compliance customers, particularly in government sectors, this rigor is non-negotiable,” she explains. “From vulnerability assessments to encryption verification, every control must be automated, logged, and inherently repeatable.”
Hybrid scenarios add another layer of complexity. Some ERP components may remain on-premises for regulatory or architectural reasons. Automation becomes the glue that synchronises data, enforces encryption in transit and at rest, and ensures users experience a seamless system, even when parts of it span multiple environments.
Many Oracle ERP teams arrive in the cloud with decades of cron jobs and custom scripts. These are often brittle, undocumented, and tightly coupled to specific servers. Adimulam advocates for a decomposition strategy: cataloguing those legacy scripts, understanding their intent, and then refactoring them into modular, policy-driven workflows.
“Automation becomes the glue that synchronises data, enforces encryption
in transit and at rest, and ensures users experience a seamless system.”
Event-driven design replaces fixed schedules. File arrivals, API calls, and queue messages trigger downstream processes automatically. When combined with centralised dashboards, teams gain visibility not just into whether a job ran, but whether the entire business process completed successfully.
Automation also reshapes governance. In cloud-native Oracle ERP environments, architecture reviews, security checks, and compliance controls can be embedded directly into workflows. Policies become code. Changes are version-controlled. Audit trails are automatic.
“The business impact shows up quickly in executive metrics.”
The business impact shows up quickly in executive metrics. Adimulam points to improvements in SLA adherence, audit outcomes, and time-to-close. Month-end financial cycles that once took over a week can shrink to a few days when approvals, validations, and hand-offs are orchestrated rather than manual.
“Leadership confidence comes from visibility,” she says. “Dashboards that show recovery times, exceptions, and compliance status change the conversation from firefighting to operational excellence.”
Where Automic and Ignite Technology fit
While Oracle provides a rich set of cloud-native services, many organisations need an orchestration layer that spans ERP, legacy systems, and adjacent platforms. This is where workload automation platforms such as Broadcom’s Automic come into play.
Automic is designed to sit above individual systems, coordinating workflows across Oracle ERP, OCI services, legacy E-Business Suite environments, data pipelines, and security processes. Rather than replacing native tools, it connects them into a single, policy-driven control plane.
“After migration, the real challenge is orchestration across boundaries,” says Martin Hulbert, CTO of Ignite Technology. “ERP doesn’t run in isolation anymore. You need one place where dependencies, events, and exceptions are managed end to end.”
“ERP doesn’t run in isolation anymore. You need one place
where dependencies, events, and exceptions are managed end to end.”
According to Hulbert, Automic helps organisations move away from time-based scheduling toward condition-based execution. Jobs start when prerequisites are met—files arrive, APIs respond, validations pass—not when a clock ticks. Increasingly, those conditions can be informed by historical run data and predictive analytics, allowing Automic to anticipate delays or failures and adjust execution paths proactively rather than reacting after something breaks.
“That shift is critical for finance and operations,” he says. “If a downstream process starts too early, you don’t just get a failed job—you get incorrect numbers.”
Ignite Technology complements Automic with integration and modernisation services. These include cataloging legacy scripts, redesigning workflows, and embedding governance into automation frameworks. For organisations migrating Oracle ERP, Ignite often works alongside ERP, cloud, and security teams to define operating models that scale.
“Automation isn’t just tooling… It’s about standardising how changes
happen, how incidents are handled, and how accountability is enforced.”
“Automation isn’t just tooling,” Hulbert adds. “It’s about standardising how changes happen, how incidents are handled, and how accountability is enforced. That’s where integration services matter.”
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of post-migration automation is what it frees teams to do next. When ERP operations are repeatable and governed, organisations can focus on analytics, AI, and new business capabilities rather than maintenance.
“Automation is an investment,” Adimulam says. “But once it’s in place, it becomes reusable. Your teams stop firefighting and start innovating.”
For enterprises migrating Oracle ERP to the cloud, that distinction may define success. Without automation, cloud ERP risks becoming a more expensive version of the past. With it, ERP evolves into a resilient, auditable, and extensible backbone for the modern enterprise.
Your Next Steps
Let’s start the conversation today, contact our team to explore your options and build an automation and orchestration strategy that sets you up for long-term success.
