Matt Johnson, Senior Director, Product Strategy

You wake up a little late on Monday, and you barely have time to get a bite to eat before you rush outside to drive to work. As you open your car door, you notice a big screen in the middle of the dash that wasn’t there before. It looks really cool, but you have no idea what it does. The ignition switch has also disappeared, replaced by a button marked “Start.” You press it, and nothing happens.

“What’s going on?” you wonder out loud. And then you remember: we got an upgrade this weekend. As you try every combination of controls imaginable without success, you can’t help but think: “All I want to do is drive to work. Can’t I deal with this some other time?” 

A bad dream? Maybe, but it still may feel awfully familiar. Enterprise application upgrades may introduce great new features, but they can also disrupt your well-worn path through common tasks. The risk only grows with Cloud applications, which march out new releases every three months.

Fortunately, with Oracle Cloud applications, you can “opt in” to new features that significantly alter the user experience or algorithms. For example, customers in Portugal may be thrilled that Oracle Procurement Cloud generates a country-specific tax audit file starting in Release 18A, but you would rather not see it. On the other hand, you might want to use a new feature like metered assets for subscription billing eventually, but not right now. It’s great to know that you can simply opt in later. Until then, you can continue to work as before.

Now some of these features can’t be switched off forever, as increasing amounts of future functionality depends upon them, but Oracle Cloud’s Functional Setup Manager warns you of any opt-in feature that is due to become mandatory, so you can plan for the change.

You finally make it to work on Monday, and now that you’d had a chance to get used to it, you can’t imagine how you ever lived without that big touchscreen in your car. The backup camera, entertainment system and traffic alerts are all fantastic. It just would have been a lot less stressful if you could enable the features on your own schedule, like you can on Oracle Cloud.

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