Charles Marcus @Customer
For the sake of comparison, here's an example of an E-Business Suite On Demand @Customer solution. Established in London in 1977 as a chartered accounting organization, Charles Marcus extended its operations in 1984 to include management consulting in Europe. The Sydney office opened in 1996. Unlike most professional services firms, Charles Marcus employs consultants who work as independently as possible. Although the consultants select and manage their own projects, mainly the design and implementation of enterprise applications, Charles Marcus bills the client and pays the consultant a salary subject to local payroll taxes.
With plans to expand operations in Europe and Southeast Asia, Charles Marcus realized it needed to upgrade its business systems to support multiple currencies and online access to applications. Its legacy system had no support for multiple currencies. Billing in currencies other than the pound sterling (GBP) was prepared manually and entered in GBP at spot rates of conversion. Expanding in new markets would have demanded time-consuming manual conversions, putting a strain on the company's billing staff. They knew that the increased volume and complexity of expanded operations would push its fragmented legacy systems to the breaking point, so a single, consolidated system was a must. All of this led to the choice to move to Oracle's applicationsthe E-Business suite.
With so much of the Charles Marcus application usage centered in Australia, it made sense to locate the computers in Australia. Using the @Customer model, Charles Marcus selected Hostworks of Adelaide Australia to purchase and house the servers in Australia. Given the power of the Oracle On Demand model, these standardized servers could be managed reliably by Oracle engineers thousands of miles away.