*Gartner's Cloud ERP recommendations for on-premises Oracle customers urge caution, but not inaction. Beacon's assessment is that Release 13 is good enough for larger companies to consider today.*
The Quest User Group has recently posted a link to a "paper" from Gartner entitled What ERP Customers Need to Know About Oracle Cloud Applications. Customers that are Gartner subscribers can find this research and much more on the Gartner site.
This dispassionate report makes a number of good suggestions, and the information is on-target. Oracle sales marketing people do indeed use "Fusion Apps" to describe their SaaS offerings. Fusion is on the price lists, (and Mark Hurd always calls them Fusion Apps, so the sales folks do, too.)
Gartner (who invented the term) uses ERP in traditional sense: all back-office products covering Financials, HCM and Supply Chain applications. So this article is relevant to all organizations running Oracle on-premises applications.
The best advice Gartner gives is essentially the same advice they have been giving for decades. (This is a compliment.)
"Use your ERP strategy to provide direction on how to realize the business benefits you seek. A simple "cloud first" strategy isn't enough."
By Xhienne - SWOT pt.svg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2838770
Of course, many companies don't have a strategy for ERP; they have habits. Especially with a move to the cloud for "transformation", ERP strategy defines an on-going or continuous basis, not just a single project or upgrade.
Oracle Cloud ERP has to date mostly served the SMB (Small and Medium Business) market. Along with Oracle's Netsuite ERP products — mostly targeted at companies under $100 million—Oracle has had great success. But until R13 (scheduled for August 2017 but not very available until early 2018), our opinion here at Beacon has been Cloud? Not yet. After more than a few years of preparation, this year we have begun working with some large organizations on Cloud ERP and or HCM migrations.
Caution (and scepticism) is always a good idea. Oracle's Cloud ERP is a good enough product to consider today, especially in non-manufacturing industries.