By John O'Rourke January 17, 2018
Many organizations have relied on Oracle's Hyperion EPM applications for years to support their financial consolidation, reporting, planning and analysis processes. While these applications have provided business value, their fragmented architecture has made them costly to deploy, maintain and upgrade. With these applications approaching their end of life, Oracle is pressuring customers to migrate to its cloud-based EPM applications. But these solutions have the same architecture and challenges as their on-premise ancestors and, in some cases, don't offer equivalent functionality.
Before bowing to Oracle's pressure, smart Finance and IT organizations are considering and evaluating alternatives to Oracle Cloud EPM solutions, and many are choosing OneStream.
Don't Get Stuck with Yesterday's EPM Applications
Oracle's Hyperion enterprise performance management (EPM) applications have been in the market for over 15 years. And many organizations have improved their budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidation and reporting processes with the oracle planning and budgeting cloud service. However, the fragmented architecture of these applications has made them costly to deploy, maintain and upgrade, especially for large enterprises with extensive deployments. Here are just some examples of the challenges customers face with the Hyperion applications:
- Hyperion Enterprise is no longer supported by Oracle, causing compliance issues
- Data must be moved between Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to support actual vs. budget variance analysis
- Multiple instances of Hyperion applications are required to address the needs of both corporate and subsidiary or business unit planning and reporting requirements
- An additional module must be licensed to support centralized management of meta data across the Hyperion suite
- Upgrades to new releases can be very costly and disruptive to business processes
In recent years, Oracle has been shifting its R&D investment from its on-premise Hyperion applications to Oracle Cloud EPMapplications. While this shift to cloud-based applications alleviates the need to set up and maintain infrastructure to support the applications, not much else has changed. The architecture of Oracle's Cloud EPM applications is still fragmented, and some of these applications are immature and lacking the capabilities of their on-premise ancestors.
Don't Feel Pressured to Move to the Cloud
Despite the drawbacks of Oracle's Cloud EPM applications, Oracle has announced plans to cease support for current releases of Hyperion on-premise applications in 2020 and is now putting a great deal of pressure on customers to migrate to its Cloud EPM applications.
IT industry analysts and other experts in the industry are encouraging Oracle Hyperion customers to consider other alternatives before committing to migrate to Oracle's Cloud EPM applications. Viable and proven alternatives are available in the market that have more modern architectures, offer new capabilities, and support on-premise or cloud deployments. One of those proven alternatives is OneStream Software.
Modernize Finance with a Unified SmartCPMTM Platform
OneStream provides a revolutionary corporate performance management (CPM) solution - it's called the OneStream XF SmartCPM platform (XF stands for extensible finance). OneStream XF unifies and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics and financial data quality for sophisticated organizations. And the platform can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud so you can "have it your way."
OneStream is the first and only solution that delivers corporate standards and controls, with the flexibility for business units to report and plan at additional levels of detail without impacting corporate standards – all through a single application. We call this unique capability "Extensible DimensionalityTM."
The hallmark of a SmartCPM solution is the capability of having multiple solutions for actuals, budgets, forecasts, plans, reconciliations, profitability and more all living together in a single application. Each solution benefits from leveraging all that the platform offers. OneStream XF eliminates risky integrations, validations, and reconciliations between multiple products, applications and modules.
Another unique capability of OneStream is the XF MarketPlace. The OneStream XF MarketPlace features downloadable solutions that allow customers to easily extend the value of their CPM platform to meet the changing needs of Finance and Operations. Examples of OneStream XF MarketPlace solutions that are already available and in use by customers include People Planning, CapEx Planning, Cash Planning, Account Reconciliations, Sales Planning, and many others.
Hundreds of mid-sized to large enterprises around the world and across industries have implemented OneStream XF and are seeing the advantages. In fact, 70% of our customers have switched from Oracle Hyperion on-premise applications, and others have migrated from legacy solutions offered by SAP, IBM and other vendors. These organizations have achieved a number of benefits.
- Reduced the time, effort and cost of maintaining legacy applications
- Simplified financial close, consolidation and reporting
- Improved agility in budgeting, planning and forecasting
- Accelerated delivery of new applications and business insights
Learn More
A new OneStream white paper provides more details on the challenges organizations face with the legacy Hyperion applications, the shortfalls of Oracle Cloud EPM applications, and the advantages customers are gaining by converting to OneStream XF – the proven alternative for global enterprises with sophisticated requirements. Download the white paper, and contact OneStream for a free conversion assessment. John O'Rourke is Vice President of Product Marketing at OneStream Software. With a background in accounting and finance, John has over 30 years of experience in the software industry, including 20 years of experience in product marketing at Hyperion Solutions, Oracle and Host Analytics. He has worked with many customers and partners on financial reporting and planning initiatives and has spoken and written on many topics in corporate performance management. John has also held positions in strategic marketing and product marketing at Dun & Bradstreet Software, Kenan Systems and Decisyon.
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