Hyperion Enterprise Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service

So the Dark Lord has been keeping a secret within that has been burning because this could possibly be a game changer for Oracle Hyperion in the cloud and last week, Enterprise Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service was officially announced at Openworld and so the secret is now out!

The ‘non-enterprise’ version of PBCS has been out for a couple of years now and whilst the platform and technology underneath is strong and proven to work in a cloud environment, it was still a blank canvas and therefore the work involved to develop an application was still of a similar effort as if the solution was based on the ‘old’ on premise Hyperion Planning.

Enterprise Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service is built on the same proven platform but adds pre-built applications around:

i)                 Full Financials i.e. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and calculated Cash Flow

ii)                Project Planning

iii)              Workforce Planning

iv)              Capital Planning

Some of you may shudder from the mention of Workforce, Projects and Capital planning from experience of the ‘on premise’ applications and in fact Oracle recognise that the majority of developers out there tend to ditch most of the pre-build but this time, it looks a little different.

A month ago, the Dark Lord attended a ‘pre-general release’ partner viewing where we were taken though what had been built to date for the new applications.  From what I saw, the new solutions looks really good.

No longer are they USA centric, especially on workforce.  Oracle have built ‘wizards’ into each solution that allow the developer to input new metadata into the right place into the application.  For maybe the first time, it becomes a lot easier for the end user/admin to build a model……..Is this the end of the consultant????  Well, no but it’s certainly a step forward from PBCS which relied heavily on consultant input into the design.

The financial application is probably where the benefit will be felt by most customers as it’s still the case that most companies are using Excel to generate the three primary statements, often only two and in many cases, just the p&l.

The cash flow in EPBCS is automatically generated and also offers full currency translation functionality so should deal with the ‘often complex’ impact of exchange in the cash flow statement.

Workforce looked great……..and I’ve never said this about the on premise version.  It still offers planning by employee or role but the addition of the wizards really simplifies the development.

The wizard lets you specify categories of people cost (e.g. flat percentages, stepped changes, ceilings) and then you add the detail and link these to the appropriate roles.  The demo here looked great………straight out of the box!

All of his looks excellent but what’s the cost?  Well, this is still moving but the thought is that it will be about twice PBCS so still cheap as chips.

The other cloud planning providers are also offering ‘accelerators’ but I haven’t seen anything this comprehensive so my hat is taken off to Oracle product development for their vision.  Of course, the proof in the planning pudding will be when we start to implement it and try breaking it BUT so far so good………

Well done Oracle!