By Philip Martin,
CEO, Rapid4Cloud
As this blog post goes live, my excellent Rapid4Cloud counterparts in the Middle East are already enjoying their weekend, and I am looking forward to the start of mine. For the consultant class and middle management though, a combination of job creep, multiple crises that suck attention and poor change management mean weekends shackled to a laptop or at least stressing about what Monday would bring.
An expert consultant or senior analyst may have been through multiple Oracle Cloud Applications implementations or run impact analysis and regression testing of quarterly updates many, many times. But it never gets any faster or more efficient. You are probably running a project involving dozens of individuals both on and offshore keying data into Oracle Cloud Applications or carrying the full load yourself, perhaps over your weekend. Some of you are spending your weekends developing automation scripts by hand for hundreds of different processes and environments. You are on a treadmill you can’t seem to slow down or step away from, or critical projects grind to a halt.
Enter the robots!
Many large and even some smaller Oracle Cloud Applications consulting operations, or even end user organizations, now run software that applies advanced robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to vast swaths of implementations, migrations, regression testing—the tasks involved in standing up and maintaining the applications.
Technology should give us back the time we would otherwise spend doing things that suck our souls and for which we are ill-suited. Modern intelligent cloud automation software eliminates the repetitive work required to do things like:
- conform to new definitions and requirements
- analyze differences between the multiple environments a company might run
- streamline migration paths
- and run regression and non-regression testing.
In this, Rapid4Cloud is part of a broad trend towards AI and RPA augmenting humans to create value that previously had been done without the aid of robots.
According to McKinsey, AI can drive more than $200 billion in value in the high tech sector.
A 2020 survey by Cognilytica showed that 40 percent of business decision-makers already have one or more AI projects in place, and fully 90 percent plan to have an in-progress AI implementation within two years.
Major technology players are investing in AI to automate work that had been performed by consultants, including IBM’s recent acquisition of MyInvenio whose product identifies business processes that can be automated and application performance monitoring (APM) vendor Instana.
Redefining the “weekend warrior”
This rise of the robots does not mean we will wind up with Skynet, but rather will get our weekends back. I’m just reflecting on a weekend that represented a turning point for us at Rapid4Cloud.
In 2019, Thursdays through Sundays accounted for 42 percent of all activity on our platform. In 2021 so far, Thursdays through Sundays accounts for 47 percent of activity, and that notable week in September was 58 percent. Mondays used to account for 20 percent of all jobs run on our platform for the week. That has fallen to 13 percent. Our customers are now coming in at the beginning of the week, getting some jobs running, watching them unfold, discussing the results, testing the output, making decisions and going home for the weekend while the robots work. The alternative is working through the weekend to implement those decisions. So, at best you’ve lost time on the project due to the weekend, at worst you’ve lost your weekend.
On the whole, our bots are busiest on the weekend. It used to be the case that weekends were the quietest times on our servers. Now our customers have gone through the mental paradigm shift, realizing that our bots are just another member of their team – one who will work days, nights, even weekends without even a coffee break.
In one respect, this enables our customers to be that weekend warrior, pursuing a sport or a passion in their free time. In another respect, our bots are the weekend warriors—fighting the battles that our customers would otherwise be struggling with during what is supposed to be their personal time.
So, while hundreds of Oracle consultants around the world get some well-earned rest, our bots were are working away on their behalf—running reports, loading setups, synchronizing environments, configuring new business units.
That makes us feel like our intelligent cloud automation software is doing more than helping meet business deliverables—we are also improving the quality of life for our customers. Thank you to all our customers for your support, and I hope you are looking forward to seeing what our “weekend warrior” robots will have done for you over the next two days. I hope you have a relaxing weekend.
Read more about our advanced approach to automated automation here.
Rapid4Cloud Announces Support for Oracle Fusion Applications 22B
We’re delighted to announce we have completed certification on Oracle’s latest update of our Cloud Applications – 22B.
Oracle customer’s will now be either running 22A or 22B in their applications environments, and can use Rapid4Cloud in either to simplify their essential configuration and data management tasks.
Don’t forget that Rapid4Cloud also supports Oracle releases back to 21A. Contact us today for more information!
What COP26 means for SaaS software vendors like Rapid4Cloud
By Philip Martin, CEO of Rapid4Cloud
As we absorb all that has happened during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), we at Rapid4Cloud are considering what we can do to lower our carbon footprint and those of the consulting firms and companies that use our robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to automate elements of their Oracle Cloud Applications estates.
The events of COP26 have inspired me to commit Rapid4Cloud to achieve carbon neutrality by the end of June 2022. I do this with good intentions, and firmly in the knowledge that I might be accused of virtue-signaling or greenwashing to build brand credentials. Think what you will – I know what I want to achieve. With COP26 fresh in our minds it seems appropriate for us all to explore the impact we and our businesses have on our planet.
SaaS is pretty green
As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) software vendor, we could make the argument that we already provide our customers an environmentally-friendly alternative to running similar software in an on-premise data center. IDC estimates that between just moving from on-premise to cloud could save 629 million metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere between 2021 and 2024—and this is given no additional efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers globally. With every data center adopted more carbon-neutral processes, that figure could swell to 1.6 billion metric tons.
Cloud vendors including Oracle, on whose data centers Rapid4Cloud’s robotic process automation (RPA) bots run, are taking aggressive steps towards carbon neutrality. Oracle has committed to 100 percent use of renewables to power its cloud by 2025 and to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. This target has been approved by the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, an accredited partner of the United Nations Race to Zero.
Bots greener than people
In a new whitepaper, we explore how using RPA to automate the more time-consuming and repetitive elements of implementing and managing Oracle Cloud Applications will drastically reduce carbon emissions versus relying on humans with their laptops and monitors, which consume many times over the amount of power required to operate the fraction of an Oracle Cloud server our bots would consume as they complete a process.
On the whole, little serious research has been devoted to how much fewer resources robot workers consume versus human ones. We keep our numbers at a pretty high level in the whitepaper, but the data is clear. Whether you are implementing a greenfield instance of Oracle Cloud ERP or just rolling out software to a new business unit or division, automating these processes could be one step towards reducing your company’s contribution to global warming.
Rapid4Cloud Announces Support for Oracle Fusion Applications 21D
We’re delighted to announce we have completed certification on Oracle’s latest update of our Cloud Applications – 21D.
Oracle customer’s will now be either running 21C or 21D in their applications environments, and can use Rapid4Cloud in either to simplify their essential configuration and data management tasks.
Don’t forget that Rapid4Cloud also supports Oracle releases back to 21A. Contact us today for more information!
Why hundreds of Oracle consultants owe their weekend to robots
By Philip Martin,
CEO, Rapid4Cloud
As this blog post goes live, my excellent Rapid4Cloud counterparts in the Middle East are already enjoying their weekend, and I am looking forward to the start of mine. For the consultant class and middle management though, a combination of job creep, multiple crises that suck attention and poor change management mean weekends shackled to a laptop or at least stressing about what Monday would bring.
An expert consultant or senior analyst may have been through multiple Oracle Cloud Applications implementations or run impact analysis and regression testing of quarterly updates many, many times. But it never gets any faster or more efficient. You are probably running a project involving dozens of individuals both on and offshore keying data into Oracle Cloud Applications or carrying the full load yourself, perhaps over your weekend. Some of you are spending your weekends developing automation scripts by hand for hundreds of different processes and environments. You are on a treadmill you can’t seem to slow down or step away from, or critical projects grind to a halt.
Enter the robots!
Many large and even some smaller Oracle Cloud Applications consulting operations, or even end user organizations, now run software that applies advanced robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to vast swaths of implementations, migrations, regression testing—the tasks involved in standing up and maintaining the applications.
Technology should give us back the time we would otherwise spend doing things that suck our souls and for which we are ill-suited. Modern intelligent cloud automation software eliminates the repetitive work required to do things like:
In this, Rapid4Cloud is part of a broad trend towards AI and RPA augmenting humans to create value that previously had been done without the aid of robots.
According to McKinsey, AI can drive more than $200 billion in value in the high tech sector.
A 2020 survey by Cognilytica showed that 40 percent of business decision-makers already have one or more AI projects in place, and fully 90 percent plan to have an in-progress AI implementation within two years.
Major technology players are investing in AI to automate work that had been performed by consultants, including IBM’s recent acquisition of MyInvenio whose product identifies business processes that can be automated and application performance monitoring (APM) vendor Instana.
Redefining the “weekend warrior”
This rise of the robots does not mean we will wind up with Skynet, but rather will get our weekends back. I’m just reflecting on a weekend that represented a turning point for us at Rapid4Cloud.
In 2019, Thursdays through Sundays accounted for 42 percent of all activity on our platform. In 2021 so far, Thursdays through Sundays accounts for 47 percent of activity, and that notable week in September was 58 percent. Mondays used to account for 20 percent of all jobs run on our platform for the week. That has fallen to 13 percent. Our customers are now coming in at the beginning of the week, getting some jobs running, watching them unfold, discussing the results, testing the output, making decisions and going home for the weekend while the robots work. The alternative is working through the weekend to implement those decisions. So, at best you’ve lost time on the project due to the weekend, at worst you’ve lost your weekend.
On the whole, our bots are busiest on the weekend. It used to be the case that weekends were the quietest times on our servers. Now our customers have gone through the mental paradigm shift, realizing that our bots are just another member of their team – one who will work days, nights, even weekends without even a coffee break.
In one respect, this enables our customers to be that weekend warrior, pursuing a sport or a passion in their free time. In another respect, our bots are the weekend warriors—fighting the battles that our customers would otherwise be struggling with during what is supposed to be their personal time.
So, while hundreds of Oracle consultants around the world get some well-earned rest, our bots were are working away on their behalf—running reports, loading setups, synchronizing environments, configuring new business units.
That makes us feel like our intelligent cloud automation software is doing more than helping meet business deliverables—we are also improving the quality of life for our customers. Thank you to all our customers for your support, and I hope you are looking forward to seeing what our “weekend warrior” robots will have done for you over the next two days. I hope you have a relaxing weekend.
Read more about our advanced approach to automated automation here.
Rapid4Cloud is SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant
Comprehensive audit validates Rapid4Cloud as a trusted automation platform partner, meeting the standard expected by customers in a highly regulated and security-conscious market.
SAN JOSE, CA – October 13, 2021 – Rapid4Cloud, the leaders in automation tools to support Oracle Cloud Applications customers to implement, run and maintain their solutions, today announced that it has successfully completed the System and Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 audit. Conducted by Holzman Partners LLP, a leading professional services firm based in Austin, Texas, the audit affirms that Rapid4Cloud’s information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations meet the SOC 2 standards for security, availability, and confidentiality.
As companies are moving their IT operations to the Cloud and deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to support their businesses, the increasing use of outside vendors to perform activities that are core to their business operations requires high levels of trust and transparency into these vendors operations and processes.
Rapid4Cloud has always maintained high security standards, and the SOC2 audit is an endorsement of this.
Rapid4Cloud’s SOC 2 report verifies the existence of internal controls which have been designed to meet the requirements for the security principles set forth in the TSP section 100, Trust Services Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy. It provides a thorough review of how Rapid4Cloud’s internal controls affect the security, availability, and processing integrity of the systems it uses to process users’ data, and the confidentiality and privacy of the information processed by these systems. This independent validation of security controls is crucial reassurance for customers that Rapid4Cloud is processing their data in a secure and compliant way.
“Obtaining the SOC 2 Type 2 certification demonstrates Rapid4Cloud’s ongoing commitment to the security, availability, and integrity of our platform,” Rapid4Cloud IT and Security Director Teerapat Muannum said. “Our customers can feel confident that we make every investment to maintain the highest level of security and compliance.”
Grupo Prodensa Selects Rapid4Cloud to Accelerate Oracle Cloud Implementation
Grupo Prodensa saves time and lowers cost of ownership of Oracle Cloud Applications by using Rapid4Cloud
Rapid4Cloud version 21C enhances security, compliance, usability
Rapid4Cloud has released a new version of its automation suite for Oracle Cloud Applications. The suite automates and accelerates many repetitive and manual processes involved in implementing and maintaining Oracle Cloud applications.
Our mission as a company is simple; to make it easier to implement and run Oracle Fusion Applications. The three words, “make it easier” defines the culture of our organization, well beyond our development philosophy. With each new release and each management decision, we strive make it easier to implement and run Oracle Cloud Applications.
What is in Release 21C?
Security and Compliance
We have fully tested our software suite against Oracle ERP Cloud 21c and Oracle HCM Cloud 21c and certified Rapid4Cloud as compatible.
The product adds Google SSO to its options for single sign-on in response to customers’ needs.
For new connections to the platform, access control can be added by individual users as well as user group. This simplifies user management. It also makes it easier to manage which users can perform which functions on what environments.
Usability
When they run a report, users can now save their report filtering selections.
This is an extension of the individual task selection added to Reports in October 2020, which inspired our customers to share their positive feedback and ideas on how to make the feature even more impactful. You can build your own library of saved selections and re-use them anytime. This is particularly useful if you want to save baseline selections for future comparison or when creating comparison reports across different instances e.g. comparing test to production. Learn more!
Users are now able to cancel a Change Management job during the data validation stage. As a result, you now have greater control over the jobs you are running.
Roadmap future investments
The Rapid4Cloud development team is hard at work bringing you more enhancements in the next few months. We are preparing to announce:
July 2021 was the busiest month ever on the Rapid4Cloud platform, according to CEO Philip Martin.
“We now have more users representing more Oracle customers and projects than ever before, and we are delighted that we are bringing benefit to so many in this community,” Martin said.
Contact us today to find out more!
Rapid4Cloud Announces Support for Oracle Fusion Cloud 21B
Rapid4Cloud is pleased to announce the latest update of Platform, version 2.1.1 which brings new features, bug fixes and major improvements to further enhance user experience. Alongside this release is our Knowledgebase support for Oracle Fusion Cloud version 21B; a pdf containing more details can be downloaded here
For introduction and a quick tutorial on how to use Platform, please head to www.rapid4cloud.com/training
What’s new in platform 2.1.1?
Added
CONNECTIONS Get the list of the users for next filtering option feature.
Changed
GENERAL Data validations step in workflow activated for Copy, Rollout, Change Management.
For more information on how Rapid4Cloud validates your data, please see this video
Fixed
COPY Wrong email content on validation failure.
COPY Error when no connection available.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT Wrong email content on validation failure.
CHANGE MANGEMENT Error when no connection available.
CONNECTION Issue with wrong DNS setup from Oracle Fusion.
REPORT Error when no connection available.
ROLES Issue when user is set back to default role.
ROLLOUT Error when no connection available.
GENERAL Typo on Fixed Assets.
More details of Platform updates can be found at https://platform.rapid4cloud.com/changelog
We have also added a training video on how you can validate and fix your data before loading to an Oracle Fusion Cloud instance, link can be found here
End of Support for Oracle Fusion Cloud 20D
We are announcing our end of support for Oracle Fusion Cloud (ERP and HCM) version 20D. As part of our continuing efforts to provide up to date support and following the Oracle release cycle for Fusion Cloud, we are updating our Knowledge Base, the core of our tools, to support up to the recent two major releases (21A and 21B).
To know which versions are currently supported, please go to platform.rapid4cloud.com/changelog
Should you have any questions about this end of support notification, or for assistance in understanding the options available to you, please contact our support by logging a ticket at support.rapid4cloud.com or by contacting your Partner/Sales Manager.
Exciting New Feature Release: Rapid4Cloud Platform 2.1 with Enhanced Validation and Smart Monitoring
We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of Rapid4Cloud Platform 2.1. The majority of the enhancements on this release were designed to add functionality to our Enhanced Validation and Smart Monitoring processes. We firmly believe that providing you with a more intelligent validation engine and smarter monitoring saves you more time and effort.
Previously, validation happened after submitting your data and when our AI engine calls the Robotic processes (RPA) involved towards the completion of the task you ordered. Should the RPA fail because of incompatible, incomplete or incorrect data, the system will notify you and you will have to resubmit the corrected BR100 sheets. You would have to repeat the same course whenever an error occurs with the data submitted.
Say goodbye to that tedious process as we have digitized over 500 rules and continuously training our engine to be smarter! Our Enhanced Validation engine whom we call EVa, will check the templates submitted and ensure the accuracy of the data, and that any pre-requisites are already in the target, or due to be set up as part of the current data load by checking other templates in the BR100. Once EVa detects an issue with your data submission, it will send you an email suggesting to check, amend, or delete the incorrect data to your requested task or other tasks which might fail the rules.
Figure 1 A sample notification that the task has been paused due to data issues
Figure 2 A screen showing that the data validation has failed and a report can be downloaded to check issue/s. Once issues get rectified, it will be easy to upload the amended data.
Figure 3 A sample report where the customer is informed of the issue by a shaded cell, with an Excel note explaining the problem
EVa will be integrated with the workflows of Copy, Rollout, Change and RapidStart starting with the release of Platform 2.1 due on the first week of May.
As we continue to put more intelligence into EVa, issues might still occur after validating your submission. Therefore we have also made our monitoring process smarter as it can now pause an ongoing workflow and notify you should the data load fail several times. The notification will include a zip file containing pertinent information that shows which data failed to load and even a screenshot of the Oracle Fusion screen where the error occurred. The enhancements on our monitoring tool will be integrated with our Change Management software on Platform release 2.1.
Figure 4 A sample summary of errors linking to the specific screenshot and log file/s
These changes should enhance your project deliveries but if you think your current workflow will be greatly affected please consult with Rapid4Cloud support at https://support.rapid4cloud.com or contact your Partner or Sales Manager.