To upgrade or not to upgrade, that is the question……….

LinkedIn is brilliant isn’t it, so many relevant focus groups and so much more information to help (or hinder) your daily life.  Last week I got an update from one of the groups saying that the grace period for Hyperion 11.1.2.3. had been extended for which my first reaction was……..”Oh no, so that means there must be serious issues with 11.1.2.4. that I’m not aware of – AAARGH

My main concern was that my team are using 11.1.2.4. for our current client for Hyperion Planning, HFM, FDMEE and DRM i.e. the whole works.  We naturally carried out some internal testing of the version, and found a few major issues such as not being able to load any rules into HFM, but once we’d reported to Oracle support, we applied patches to resolve each issue.

We also looked to external sources of information for any reported bugs but found a clean bill of health so took the plunge and it’s been fine.  Of course now I can’t sleep because the grace period extension is keeping me awake at night.  Maybe we missed something and our whole world will fall apart.  Could the Dark Lord have missed something…………..GULP!

Given the importance of the upgrade decision, here are a few topics to bear in mind before you jump to the next version of…...

That Support email

By far the most common reason most people upgrade comes in the form of an email from Larry’s penthouse in Lanai when he explains that your current version is now coming to the end of extended support and suggests that you consider to upgrade to the latest version.

This email gets the Hyperion community really excited, especially most consultancies who will happily come and upgrade you to the latest version …….at a cost of course.

Some of these will publish articles on their web sites or social media urging you to upgrade too.  Some will even write to their customers to offer them special offers to upgrade.

So should you?

Well, from a software point of view, if a version has gone through the whole release life cycle and is now ready to come out of extended support, then it’s more than likely that any bug that’s ever been found has been resolved in patches.

Also, it’s likely that more customers are on this release than any other and at the end of the day, customer become the testers so once again, this version will be the most tested version out there.

That said, there may be other reasons to consider but in isolation, the answer is definitely “If it’s not broken, why fix it.”

The Lemming effect

So whenever a new release comes along and the new functionality is presented by Oracle there are generally two reactions at the same time:

Implementation Consultant “I wonder what doesn’t work…..”

Customer “WOW that’s so cooooooooooooooooooooool”.

Wandering round at the Oracle User Groups (OUG), you often hear…….”What version are you on…..” and generally followed up by “when are you upgrading……..”

You’d be surprised but the decision to upgrade is often made after meetings when customers get together.  Needless to say, a terrible reason.  If all of my mates bought a people carrier, I wouldn’t………..If I wanted to, I’d buy a white van though, cut some windows and strap in some armchairs.

Better Toys

New functionality can often be good reason but you should treat the decision just as you would treat the initial decision to buy.

There will be costs of the upgrade, costs to implement the new functionality, business impact to roll out the new functionality etc……….All of this should be justified against the business benefit.

Note, this is not to be confused with the personal benefit for the administrator who wants to get the new bit of kit on his CV or just wants to play.

Faster, faster, faster

The IT environment moves so quickly.  Speed of processing, availability of storage and new advances in operating systems can reap rewards in the Hyperion world.

One of the most relevant releases over the past few years was when Hyperion was enabled on 64 bit technology.  Overnight the performance was lightning quick just because 64 bit was allowed to use memory that Windows had fenced off in the 32 bit world.

This was definitely a good reason.

For HFM, the back end database performance is claimed to be much more advanced than 11.1.2.3. so if this is a problem for you, maybe have a look.  That said, any performance improvement won’t cover up for a badly designed solution.

Full pockets

It was a good year, budgets have been set favourable for the year including a pot of expenditure for the Hyperion team………er, so why don’t we upgrade?

You’d be surprised how many companies plan ahead for the upgrades every 3 years and you’d be surprised how many of these decision are made by accountants!

Two words…………COST………..BENEFIT

Newbie Syndrome

I remember back in the day when I was first planning to purchase Hyperion my first thought was ‘of course I want the latest version, why wouldn’t I?’  I knew no better and was only going to be influenced by those people I talked to…………………which back then would’ve been sales people so less said about that, the better……….

Big Brother said so

Big brother in this scenario is not Lanai Larry, but Big Brother in IT!  There will always be a push from IT to have software throughout the organisation on the latest upgrade as old systems are expensive to maintain.

I have seen many times a drive to upgrade Hyperion because of a corporate decision around browser of versions of Office.

This causes problems for the Hyperion community because the supported versions generally lag behind so if IT go to version hyperspace of IE, you might find you can’t even log on.

Extreme, but can happen.

Close relationships with IT supporting your decision are the key here.

The future is cloud

Having just written this piece I realise that in 10 years it will be the equivalent of a “should I go from Betamax to VHS” as in 10 years’ time we’ll all be on the cloud and the software provider will be releasing the updates for us, taking the decision out of our hands but for now I leave you with a mental image of Lord Hamlet lighting up a cigar and pondering whether patch 501 is worth the hassle……………