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……………