After Oracle’s recent acquisition of Skire Unifier, the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit (GBU) has announced that it will replace Primavera Contract Management (PCM). This shouldn’t be a big surprise for many PCM users as the product needed considerable work and rather than embark on an ambitious rewrite, Oracle purchased Skire. Skire Unifier had been competing with PCM for many years targeting large opportunities in excess of $1M.
What is Skire Unifier?
Skire Unifier (now Primavera Unifier) should be thought of as a platform more than a product and because of this, it took considerable effort to ‘build’ a clients application. In addition, Primavera Unifier clients often have a need to integrate with other back office systems, so this extensible interface platform is based on XML Web services. This fully supports information exchange with other systems via a variety of integration methods.
The good news is that Oracle Primavera plans to create a starter application that will help clients implement faster, for less cost. Oracle Primavera has claimed that this application will be as good as PCM.
Oracle Primavera also claim that more than halve the feature requests for PCM are already available in Primavera Unifier. Examples of these include more enterprise capabilities particularly for appropriating funds, a configurable workflow, the ability to approve/reject documents from within an email, an improved cost worksheet and a much requested configurable user interface allowing users to add or hide fields.
What Happens To Primavera Contract Management?
Primavera Contract Management will be put on care and maintenance…sorry, no new functionality folks. PCM will be replaced by Primavera Unifier and will be continue to be supported by Oracle under their lifetime support policy.
Oracle Primavera is planning to offer a migration path for existing PCM users. This will be able PCM users to migrate their licenses over to the new Primavera Unifier, although it is unclear what tools will be available to aid with the data migration.
Primavera Unifier Vs Primavera Unifier Cloud Service
Oracle is offering Primavera Unifier two different ways,
- Primavera Unifier – are traditional software licenses that you install in your own environment
- Primavera Unifier Cloud Service – is a cloud service that hosted by Oracle and managed on Oracle’s servers.
Primavera Unifier is made up of five separately licensed modules.
- Primavera Capital Planning
- Primavera Project Delivery Management
- Primavera Cost Controls
- Primavera Facility Management
- Primavera Real Estate Management
For pricing and licensing, you should contact Oracle Primavera.
Primavera Unifier Capability Changes
Some of the obvious capabilities in Skire Unifier will be replaced by existing Oracle capabilities as it transitions to Primavera Unifier. These include replacing Crystal Reports with Business Intelligence Publisher, although the existing “user reports” capabilities will remain. Skire Unifier also had it’s own document management capability which will be replaced with Oracle UCM. Finally, the mapping features supplied by Google will be replaced with Oracle Maps. Of course, in the future integration with Primavera P6 EPPM will become available.
Summary
This isn’t the first time Primavera has acquired a competitive product to replace an existing one. Primavera P6 was purchased way back in 1999 and that has turned out to be a huge success (you can read about the history of Primavera P6 by clicking here). There is no reason why acquisition won’t turn out the same way.
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