Add Some “Pep” to Your Business
Does this scenario sound familiar? Your division of a large enterprise has outgrown Excel spreadsheets and is in dire need of a more robust solution for budgeting, planning, forecasting and financial reporting. Your division’s planning and reporting processes take too long and are prone to errors, and your Finance team spends too much time collecting and correcting data and not enough time on analysis.
However, your corporate Finance and IT groups are heavily invested in a legacy, on-premises set of EPM applications that haven’t been deployed to your division or are unable to meet your specific needs. And with an upcoming upgrade and many other priorities, they don’t have the time, resources or budget to support a divisional rollout of the existing EPM applications. Even if IT is available, the time it will take them to complete the project, as well as the associated costs, makes it an unreasonable option. So you are stuck!
If this sounds familiar to you, have no fear — there is a solution. Many organizations are adopting a “Hybrid EPM” or “co-existence” strategy that enables them to deploy a cloud-based EPM solution at the divisional level, with the ability to integrate the new solution with their existing corporate EPM system, such as Oracle Hyperion or SAP BPC. The beauty of this approach is that cloud-based EPM solutions don’t require an up-front investment in hardware, don’t require internal IT resources to deploy, and don’t require a big up-front license fee or high levels of on-going maintenance. The benefits companies are achieving through this approach are impressive:
- Rapid deployment of new planning and reporting applications (weeks/months vs. quarters/years)
- Elimination of error-prone spreadsheets
- Reduction in planning and reporting cycle time
- Increased accuracy of divisional plans and forecasts
- Integration and alignment with corporate EPM applications
While Host Analytics is the first company to deliver technology specifically for a Hybrid EPM deployment, the approach is not unheard of. Leading industry analysts such as Gartner have written about the emergence of Hybrid EPM (link requires a Gartner account for free access). In fact, a number of Host Analytics customers have deployed our EPM Cloud solutions in exactly this fashion and have achieved these benefits. And to make the process even easier, Host Analytics recently announced its “CloudLink for Oracle Hyperion” solution.
The Host Analytics CloudLink technology seamlessly moves data and artifacts like metadata, templates and dimensions between the Host Analytics cloud-based EPM environment and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) as well as Hyperion Planning. CloudLink is designed to solve the problem I described above, typically when an acquisition or divisional deployment needs new EPM capabilities that must work with the legacy on-premises Hyperion instance at corporate. Host Analytics excels in these situations because it delivers the complete EPM functionality of Hyperion’s EPM applications, in a unified, cloud-based suite that can be implemented at a fraction of the time and cost.
By John O’Rourke, EPM Channel Contributor, from: http://www.hostanalytics.com/blog/hybrid-epm-accelerating-delivery-of-new-epm-applications
John O’Rourke is Vice President of Product Marketing at Host Analytics. With a background in accounting and finance, John has over 30 years of experience in the software industry, and over 16 years of experience in EPM Product Marketing at Hyperion Solutions and Oracle. He has worked with many customers and partners on financial reporting and planning initiatives and has spoken and written on many topics in enterprise performance management. John has also held positions in strategic marketing and product marketing at Dun & Bradstreet Software, Kenan Systems and Decisyon. John has a BS degree in accounting from Bentley University and an MBA from Boston College. See John’s articles on EPM Channel here.