Oracle Open World 2013 General Session: Empowering Modern Enterprise Performance Management

Here at Oracle Open World 2013, I attended the general session entitled "Empowering Modern Enterprise Performance Management" which was led by Balaji Yelamanchili, Oracle Senior Vice President for Analytics and Performance Management Products.  His keynote focused on the development priorities within the Oracle EPM group.  Those priorities are:

• Continued Investment in Existing Modules
• EPM Applications in the Cloud
• Continued Innovation in New Modules

There are a number of things planned in the area of continued investment in existing modules.  The investment areas include:

• HFM platform work to make HFM cross platform and to improve performance.  In addition, these changes allow HFM to run on Exalytics which puts massive computing power under HFM.  For example, testing of HFM on Exalytics has shown that virtual close becomes a possibility even in complex consolidations.  One test that had 31,000 accounts, 2,000 legal entities and 66 currencies showed a reduction of consolidation time from 7+ hours down to less than 30 minutes.  This type of performance increase, if borne out in the real world, could have a real effect on how and when companies do their consolidations.
• Optimization of Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management for Exalytics.  This scalability allows for implementations that spread further in the company (i.e. more users), but also allow companies to consolidate their applications onto fewer physical machines.
• Packaged OBI Analytics for Hyperion Planning.  The packaged analytics make it easier and faster to deploy Hyperion Planning with an added benefit of reduced consulting costs.

Oracle is continuing its move into the cloud arena with 2 services.

• The Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service ("OPBCS") has been in customer and partner preview for a few months now and is nearly general availability.  Oracle is stressing that this isn't just moving the software to a managed service running on the cloud, but rather is a fundamental new paradigm for planning that focuses on self-serve models that have not existing since the inception of the classic, on-premise Hyperion Planning.  Because OPBCS must run without the need for IT interaction, users must be able to quickly and easily configure what they need from the service.  That being said, Oracle is taking a very conservative strategic approach with their Cloud Planning application as they are not trying to displace traditional on-premise Planning applications and move them to the cloud.  Rather, they are emphasizing the cloud for use in quick-to-deploy departmental applications or as a development platform that can be used to build an application for on-premise deployment.  Oracle expects to make the OPBCS available later this calendar year.
• A new service that was announced at Open World 2013 is the new Financial Reporting Cloud Service.  Based on the slides and the comments made during the presentation, this isn't simply moving the classic Hyperion Financial Reporting application to the cloud, but rather they have imagined and created an application that appears to be targeted for statutory reporting.  How it appears to work is that the developer/administrator creates a framework for the reporting package which may be, for example, a corporate annual report and can assign responsibilities for different parts of the report to team members.  The editing of different components can be completed either via refreshing of data from the corporate data stores for items like a balance sheet or income statement, or edited in Word for things like the management discussion.  The product tracks workflow and approvals and, when complete, produces a PDF of the completed document.  It looks quite different than what we see today in HFR.

For innovation in new modules, Oracle is focused pretty heavily on mobile.  As of now, the focus on mobile has been on information consumption but Oracle plans to work towards full user functionality in the future.  They are using the 90/90 rule as a guide for their mobile effort by focusing on the functionality used by 90% of users 90% of the time.  In addition, they have created some purpose-specific applications such as the new EPM Workflow Mobile App that was created specifically for approval workflows for Planning and Financial Close.

Oracle has been working hard on the EPM Suite, but notice I didn't really say anything about my beloved Essbase.  Balaji did not say much about Essbase in his session, but rather left that for the Essbase Roadmap session that I also attended.  I will work on a blog post on that session soon.