-It's affected all our operations," Bill Wood, managing director of Agilent Australia, told ZDNet Australia. -We switched over around 50 systems to the new system: all accounting systems globally."
The problems with the Oracle software, which include applications designed to help businesses book orders and record revenues, were revealed when Agilent released its quarterly results ending July 31.
The glitches caused Agilent to lose about US$105 million in revenue and US$70 million in operating profits, the company said in a statement this week, upon posting US$228 million loss for the quarter.
-They were global systems, not regionalised at all," Wood said when questioned whether Australia had faired any better than other regions. -It's one system operating globally and is treated that way."
-It would be fair to say the disruption has been more extensive than estimated," Wood conceded, adding that there had been teething trouble despite at least a year's worth of preparation. According to Agilent's best estimates, it lost around a week of production in July.
-We're continuing to work around the system," said Wood. -We believe the system is stable." He said the change-over was not a black and white transition, and it would take time to work through it.
An Oracle Australia spokesperson said it has had Australian customers successfully complete similar migrations. "We find it's often not the product, but issues with the customer's individual situation--what their starting point is," said the spokesperson.
"We understand that Agilent are saying the issues are not with Oracle software but with migration issues from legacy systems," he said.
Despite the huge loss, Agilent has nothing but praise for Oracle. -Oracle are an excellent partner," Wood said.
Another Agilent spokesperson, Michele Drake, said the company did not blame Oracle for the problems.
"We feel that regardless of who we had as a vendor, we would have had these problems because the switch over from our legacy systems was so complex," Drake said.
Many Oracle customers encountered glitches when the software giant released a new version of its business applications last year. The company said it has fixed most of those problems, which it said were caused by rushing to sell the first version of its Web-based applications before working out all the bugs.
"At Oracle, we are fully committed to all of our customers for the long haul and support them in any way necessary," Oracle said in a statement. "We have a strong relationship with Agilent, and both companies believe the implementation is stable and fully expect that it will meet the customer's requirements going forward."
