One of our more popular blog posts at Olympus Consulting has been the comparison between Hyperion Planning and Oracle Cloud EPM Planning. As we work to constantly update the content on our site, we thought this post was due to be updated. But…everything in that post is still a great comparison between the two products. We decided that rather than just updating an old post that was still applicable to those comparing the products, it was time for a new post.
This post will cover the same comparison of Hyperion Planning and Oracle Cloud EPM Planning, but now with the context of a significant amount of new functionality having been added to the cloud. Let’s take a look at what we’ve gained on the cloud while on-premises applications remain frozen in time:
Cloud Data Management is dead…long live Data Exchange! So what is Data Exchange? Oracle has basically finally revamped the interface of FDMEE to bring it into the current century. Rather than opening a new window to modify our data integrations, Data Exchange is built directly into the core Oracle Cloud EPM interface.
But wait, it can’t just be a new interface, right? Right! Data Exchange has also added the ability to create Data Integration Expressions. These expressions come complete with a set of functions for both target and source expressions that make things like prefixing, suffixing, and concatenating much easier without the need for complex SQL mappings. Not only do things look better with much easier mapping capabilities, but we also have pipelines and the EPM Integration Agent.
Wait…what is a pipeline? While this is possibly the most exciting integration functionality added to an EPM product in over a decade, Oracle did us no favors with the name. A pipeline, in overly simplistic terms, gives us a built-in full automation suite for all of our EPM products. We can now define reasonably complex automations with full error handling, logging, and notifications. We could (and will) make an entire blog post on this functionality, but a picture is worth a thousand words:
Wait…pipelines AND the EPM Integration Agent? That’s right, the EPM Integration Agent is the missing link from the Cloud to your on-premises data sources. It has the ability to execute SQL queries to any JDBC data source or flat file source. It also has a full scripting engine that supports not only Jython, but Groovy! This functionality combined with pipelines gives us the ability to build fully scheduled and automated processes entirely inside of the Oracle Cloud EPM solution.
Enough about integrations…what else does Oracle Cloud EPM have these days? Imagine that you have 20 on-premises Essbase cubes that you need to migrate to the cloud. This use to be a monumental task just to get the cubes themselves on the cloud. With the release of Free Form, on-premises Essbase cubes can be directly imported into the cloud!
Free Form takes all of the things we loved about Essbase as a platform, and gives us much of the additional power of Hyperion Planning. It does all of this while not having any specific required dimensions or limitations around how a cube is designed. Each Free Form application can even have up to 12 different plan types (cubes)!
For those customers thinking that the cloud will never work because they have too much Essbase, its no longer necessary to consider Essbase 21C as a separate parallel system to maintain. Oracle Cloud EPM can now handle it all.
Expanding on the existing dashboard functionality, Oracle Cloud EPM has now moved on to the second release named Dashboards 2.0. With more visualizations and a much more responsive feel, its a big upgrade over the initial version of dashboarding:
Much like the upgrade to Dashboards 2.0, Oracle has graced us with a massive improvement in the user experience of forms in Oracle Cloud EPM with Forms 2.0. The new dropdown engine is a dream to use and they’ve finally brought back the tree-view version of the member selector. The days of the despised horizontal member selector are finally behind us! Along with that, Dependent Dropdowns work like a dream.
Wait…another new big thing? Dependent dropdowns have been missing from Hyperion Planning since the release of ADF in 11.1.2.2, much to many customer’s dismay. With Oracle Cloud EPM, we finally have this functionality back in action. Not only is it back, but we don’t need any crazy JavaScript or custom code of any kind. We simply define what a valid (or invalid) intersection of data that users are allowed to enter, and the dimension dropdowns will limit accordingly. Let’s see 1000 words again:
I know what you’re thinking. This was supposed to be a post comparing Hyperion Planning to Oracle Cloud EPM Planning. But where is the actual comparison? That’s just it…there isn’t one available because everything in this post isn’t available in Hyperion Planning. Oracle continues to innovate as the market leader in Budgeting and Forecasting and shows no signs of slowing down. But if you want all of these innovations, you have to make the leap to the cloud.