Licensing for Custom Mobile Apps

craig_welton

craig_welton

Legendary Poster
Hi all,

I tried to research this with the Oracle documentation and can't seem to find a definite answer ... What is the license cost for developing a custom mobile app built over a custom JDE application? The users will not be mobile only, they use the web as well. I was hearing about a heavy license based on AIS usage, but that was a while ago. If anyone has some real world experience, I'd appreciate the info.

thanks
Craig
 
There is no additional cost to make existing applications (standard or custom) available to users via another platform if those users are already licensed to use the application via the normal E1 web interface. AIS and Orchestrator are part of the tech foundation licence and do not have any other metrics on them (eg # of REST calls). You will need to look at the licence costs of the mobile platform you choose for development. For example, Oracle MAF requires licencing if you are going to develop your own mobile applications for E1.
 
Thank you Russell. If I'm reading the Oracle price list correctly, is that $50,000 (USD) per application!? plus a per-user fee.
 
Wait, if I create a custom MAF application using AIS or BSSV server and that app is used internally by existing E1 users I can still incur additional licensing costs?
 
Thank you Russell. If I'm reading the Oracle price list correctly, is that $50,000 (USD) per application!? plus a per-user fee.
One or the other. Per app metric or per user. As is usually the case with Oracle there are all sorts of deals that can be done around this if combined with other products. Obviously if you use Oracle's cloud products (MCS has now morphed into MCE) then that takes care of it as well.
 
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Wait, if I create a custom MAF application using AIS or BSSV server and that app is used internally by existing E1 users I can still incur additional licensing costs?
Yep, Oracle MAF is not covered by JDE licensing. There is a restricted use license which basically says you can make minor changes to a published JDE mobile app but you can't use that license to build your own or fundamentally change/improve an existing app.

The reality is that you'd have to have a pretty special business/use case to justify the use of Oracle MAF for custom app development.
 
Russel, thanks again. I apologize for following up with more questions. If MAF seems expensive, are you suggesting an alternative like Xamarin? or develop separate native apps?
 
Russel, thanks again. I apologize for following up with more questions. If MAF seems expensive, are you suggesting an alternative like Xamarin? or develop separate native apps?

Depends on the specific requirements. From our position we have basically settled on two solutions. We either deliver native applications (we have developed our own SDKs that enable consistent coding patterns etc but by platform thus reducing the overall effort) or we will utilise progressive web applications where platform independence is important and we don't require other features like offline data processing or specific hardware support.

The reality for most enterprise mobile applications is that they are delivered on an internal mobile fleet that is either iOS or Android based but not generally both.

We don't use hybrid platforms like Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin or even React Native because we see more issues than solutions in them. We have three main issues with the hybrid platforms. The first is the code complexity. To build an application that will support a variety of devices from one code base is painful as all of the hybrid platforms require you to implement OS/Device specific code branches etc. When we've attempted to use them previously we've estimated it takes around 25% more code to build an application compared to native and probably about 40% more effort. The next issue is performance. This varies by platform but in cases where we are dealing with large data sets (some of our apps that do a lot of offline processing can contain local databases with over 30 tables and up to 100,000 rows per table) or require high speed barcode scanning or OCR we are limited in our options to optimise the solution when using a hybrid platform. The last issue is version support and code maintenance. Apple and Google only care about backward compatibility for native applications. Hybrid apps generally suffer with forward compatibility which means that if you want your application to support iOS 12 or Android 8.1 then you have to recompile it with the latest version of the hybrid platform. Unfortunately they are all open source solutions which tends to make them fairly dynamic and each new release can cause a major code refactoring exercise to be required.

Of course we also tend to stay away from AIS and Orchestrator as far as interfacing to E1 for mobile applications. The AIS server requires both the server and the client to maintain accurate state and this makes applications complex and prone to error. Orchestrator looks to resolve this issue but it then introduces problems around complexity and inefficiency of the services. Imagine trying to build an orchestration that can add a line to sales order with an advanced pricing override or alternatively what it takes to ship confirm the third line of a sales order.
 
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