The I.T. Side

Welcome to your latest edition of the IT Side EPM Rumor Mill.

In this edition: Oracle SaaS EPM Cloud offerings

Oracle cloud offerings (cloud.oracle.com) are Software as a Service (SaaS) options for Oracle customers. Cloud SaaS is not new to Oracle – they have been doing it for quite some time around other enterprise solutions such as Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, Database as a Service, etc.  EPM services are the latest to move into this SaaS space.

Snippet from http://cloud.oracle.com

Wikipedia defines Software-as-a-Service as  “a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted”

Which means you simply RENT access to a service.  As long as your credit card is valid, you have access to the service.  You do not actually own any software, have access to the servers, etc….just a URL and a valid ID/Password combination, very similar to a salesforce.com model.  If you choose to leave the SaaS cloud and transition to an on-premise model later, you will need to purchase the software licenses at that time.

As you know Oracle Planning and Budgeting on the Cloud Service (PBCS) has been live for quite some time. Currently PBCS has core planning functionality with Smartview capabilities,  without the modules (CAPEX, WFP, PFP, etc) or EPMA. The data integration is powered a transparent FDMEE and LCM engine in the back end.

PBCS today cannot be integrated into your corporate LDAP/MSAD for authentication, is open to anyone on the internet, and has no data center level disaster recovery capabilities.

So far, PBCS has:

• 560+ subscriptions
• 300 international subscriptions
• 38,000 end users
• 70 uses of over 100 users, with the largest customer totaling 1500 users

Impressive, however less than 20% (roughly 100) of these customers are live.

We are expecting a major patch set update to PBCS in the November time frame. Exciting rumors are:

• Table Friendly
• Simple vs advanced mode toggle
• On the fly dashboards
• Excel type features
• Integration automation
• Automated versioning

Since Oracle development starts deploying new features to their cloud offering first, we should expect to see these features in coming releases of the on-premise versions.

PBCS Roadmap Rumors

Later, we are expecting even more features to be put in place.

• Built in datacenter disaster recovery failover
• LDAP integration (are you going to poke a hole in your firewall to the LDAP server?)
• Full end-to-end encryption
• IP address whitelisting
• 2 factor authentication
• Anti-virus scans

From a functionality perspective, we can expect more driver based predictions, strategy modeling, FDMEE automation, and integration with the Oracle Cloud Marketplace and Oracle Social Media.

PBCS Data Integration

One of the initial frustrations is data integration with PBCS.  It’s getting better.  Seems that Oracle is standardizing on FDMEE on all cloud application as the main mechanism for this. Many of the PBCS customers also have an on-premise implementation.  They use PBCS as a testing ground, or perhaps as a departmental solution.  Oracle is calling is a Hybrid integration.

Here are some of the ways to integrate or is on the roadmap:

• From on-premise to PBCS
  • Use FDMEE to load a file or ERP data to workbench
  • Define target as a custom application
  • After validation step, generate flat file via event script
  • Upload to the cloud using the EPM automate utility
• Upload PBCS to On-premise
  • setup FDMEE as a “file based” source
  • call EPMAutomate from event script in FDMEE to generate file from PBCS
  • Process data like a standard FDMEE import file

New offering: PBCS “Enterprise” : The Next level of Planning in the cloud

As a separate offering, it is rumored that Oracle is planning to release PBCS Enterprise, which is PBCS but with the editions of all the modules and pre-built configured content. It will have full financials, Workforce, CAPEX, and the project module. You will have all modules.  Obviously you can implement only what you want…what Oracle is calling “incremental enablement.”

The important thing to note is that this will not be a simple lift-and-shift into the Oracle Cloud. A lot of the dimensions will be fixed and not modifiable. However you will have some “flex” dimensions such as product, Market, Customer, etc. These strict rules are required so that all cloud instances can be automatically patched and upgraded.

The focus of PBCS Enterprise will be

• Dashboards
• Plan book (driver based planning, Other Expenses, Total Expenses Plan, Total Expenses Forecast, Income Statement). Change numbers and watch the graphs and calculations change automatically.
• Analysis (out of the box reports: balance sheet – forecast, balance sheet plan, compensation details, expense details,
• Approvals

Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service (EPRCS)

Even the Acronym is a mouthful.  EPRCS is a collaborative, process driven platform to author, review, and publish financial and management report packages that involve multiple people, segmented security, and approval workflow.

This is not Hyperion Financial Reports on the cloud!

This is not Hyperion Financial Reports on the cloud!

This is not Hyperion Financial Reports on the cloud!

I say that multiple times, because it is a common misconception that since Oracle moved Planning into their SaaS cloud, they plan on moving the rest of the Hyperion suite to the cloud as-is. That is not the case. This is a completely separate product that is more akin to WebFilings than Hyperion Financial Reports.

EPRCS is very collaborative and provides full lifecycle support from report definition though publishing. It has dynamic security, integrated workflow, doclet management, auditing at all levels. It has the concept of report owners, authors, approvers, etc with full revision history though a familiar check-in/check-out process. It does not require any data actually in the ERPCS cloud, you can retrieve from EPM sources.   Also, you have an option to load data into a local multidimensional engine (Essbase) for live local data retrieval and smartview integration.

It has a similar look and feel and pricing structure of PBCS ($120/user/month)

EPRCS is available now. For more information go to: https://cloud.oracle.com/enterprise-performance-reporting-cloud

EPRCS: What’s coming Rumor Mill:

• PowerPoint – full collaboration on development of PowerPoint slide content.
• Custom Fonts
• Version comparison
• Federated Single Sign On

Financial Close in the Cloud

As with the Planning/Budgeting, the Financial close development teams in Oracle are hard at work to get their side of the house represented in the cloud. The rumor is they are working on three major cloud based offerings:

• Tax Provisioning Cloud Service(TPCS)
• Account Reconsolidation Management Cloud Service (ARCS)
• Financial Consolidations Cloud Service (FCCS)

I will say this once again…. It’s important to remember:

Tax Provisioning Cloud Service IS NOT Hyperion Tax Provisioning in the cloud

Account Reconsolidation Management Cloud Service IS NOT Hyperion ARM in the cloud

Financial Consolidations Cloud Service IS NOT Hyperion Financial Management in the cloud.

There are no plans to create HFM on the cloud.   These are separate products, completely engineered for a SaaS cloud offering. As a matter of fact, the cloud based consolidations tool, FCCM, is actually based on Essbase in the back end for data storage – complete different architecture and structure.  There is no such thing as HFM in the cloud.

However that is not to say it wont have some, most, or even all of the functionally of the on-premise products. It is also not to say that there wont be tools to help customers migrate from the on-prem products to the cloud products.

I’m not sure when then will be released.  I assume some time quite into next year.  In Oracle fashion, I would assume there will be some grandiose announcement at OpenWorld, but not actually available for quite some time after. Regardless, I would not base any corporate decision on the expectation or anticipation of any of these products.

Tax provisioning Cloud service (TPCS)

• Tax provisioning and reporting solution
  • data collection
  • calculation
  • reporting
• will be Integrated with the consolidations tool FCCS
• FUSE Based UI (Tablet friendly)
• Data and metadata integration with on-prem
• Secure, role based, auditable
• Governance like capability
• Migration from on prem HTP

Account Reconciliation Management cloud service (ARCS)

• All of the functionality od on premise ARM
• Simplified for tablet use
• New analytics covering operational performance and compliance
• Supporting social interactions
• Quick deployments
  • Pr-defined content
  • flexible integrations

Financial Consolidation Cloud service (FCCS)

• Management and legal entity consolidations for board spectrum of customers
• Out of the box functionality with limited need for customization
• Task orchestration
• Tablet friendly
• native dashboard
• built in balance sheet movement translations with FX / CTA Calculations
• easy audit
• predefined dimensions
• Social integration built in
• Close calendaring built in
• Built on Essbase as a data repository

Seems data integration will still be flat file only and based on FDMEE…. Delimitated or excel based.

In the preview demo there were the following major product areas on the main screen:

• Dashboard (close calendar, compliance, financials, activity) see the progress of the close, kind of a twitter feed of what’s been going on.
• tasks
• data analysis
• journals
• documents
• reports
• approvals
• console
• settings
• academy
• navigator

Future Roadmap rumors:

• Statutory support
• Enhanced Currency handling
• Custom scripting
• Alerts
• Advanced journaling
• Simulate / modeling
• Transaction Matching cloud service.

~ by Eric Helmer on July 1, 2015.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Account Reconciliation Cloud, ARCS, FCCS, HFM cloud, Oracle, Oracle Cloud, PBCS, PBCS Enterprise, Tax Provisioning Cloud, TPCS