Is it time to leave HFM? How to know and take control of where to go next

Introductions

Trevor: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Trevor Walker, product marketing director for Financial Close and Consolidation here at OneStream.

I'm excited to be joined by several colleagues who have experience with HFM and the Oracle cloud solutions from before they joined OneStream, and who have real implementation experience with customers that have moved from HFM to OneStream.

Finance organizations today are under increasing pressure to close faster without sacrificing control and auditability, while managing growing complexity across global finance and business operations. Modernizing financial consolidation and close is no longer just about reducing cycle times. It's about building a solid foundation for continuous close processes that perform reliably at scale, with both control and auditability.

If you still run Hyperion Financial Management, or HFM, you're likely still trying to define your path forward. Do I stay? Do I move to Oracle Cloud? Or do I evaluate alternatives for consolidation and financial close? Oracle Cloud can look like the default option, but it's rarely that simple. Oracle built its financial close and consolidation applications from the ground up, so moving to Oracle Financial Consolidation isn't a lift and shift. And for many customers, what HFM handled doesn't carry over cleanly.

In today's discussion, you'll hear why HFM customers are at the point where they're reevaluating their solution, and how to tell if the time is right for you. We'll also discuss what a move from HFM to OneStream actually takes, from the experts that have guided over 450 HFM to OneStream migrations, and how to decide between staying, moving to Oracle Cloud, or moving to OneStream, and the implications of each.

And if you're attending today and you're not an HFM customer but have another legacy solution, hopefully you'll be able to draw from our experiences with HFM and take away some valuable things to help you chart your path forward.

I'm joined by three colleagues who have firsthand experience with each path and have lived different sides of the HFM decision. Nick Cox, formerly of Hyperion and Oracle, will share where the HFM landscape stands today and why customers are moving now. Welcome, Nick.

Nick: Thank you, Trevor. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining.

Trevor: I'm also joined by Tina Huysmans, who joined OneStream within the last year and was formerly inside Oracle's EPM world. She'll share where the Oracle Cloud products fit and where FCC may fall short. Welcome, Tina.

Tina: Thank you, Trevor. Hi, everyone. Happy to be with you today.

Trevor: And last but not least, probably the most important person on the call today, Keith Berry. He's in our services organization and is a product expert. He's a former Hyperion and Oracle person who has worked with HFM from the very beginning, and he has led many HFM to OneStream migrations. He's the one who will give you firsthand insight into what the move actually takes. Welcome, Keith.

Keith: Thank you, Trevor. Hello, everyone.

Trevor: As we go through today's discussion, please use the Q&A to submit questions, and we'll cover as many as we can. If we don't get to your question in real time, rest assured we'll follow up after the webinar with answers.

Why HFM customers are reevaluating now

Trevor: Nick, I'll start with you. What's pushing the majority of HFM customers to reevaluate where they are and what their next steps might be?

Nick: I think there's been a fundamental change in the question finance teams are asking. It's no longer simply, does HFM still work? For many organizations, it does. The question is whether the environment they built ten, fifteen, sometimes as much as twenty years ago is still the right foundation for where finance needs to go next.

Many organizations are looking at the effort involved in maintaining those legacy environments, but also at the bigger opportunity. They see the technical innovation available. They want to bring close, consolidation, reporting, planning, and other finance processes closer together and reduce the fragmentation they often experience, essentially creating a better foundation for automation and AI.

So the trigger isn't necessarily that HFM suddenly stops working or that support ends. That's unlikely, especially as the support dates keep moving. It's that organizations are increasingly asking whether continuing to invest in the status quo is the best use of their finance and IT resources. The question has shifted from "can we keep HFM running?" to "is this where we want to keep investing?"

My summary would be: finance has changed. The strategic requirements surrounding the close have moved beyond what most organizations were designing for when many HFM [instances] were created.

Trevor: For teams that have stayed on HFM, what's changed that makes staying even riskier than it may look?

Nick: I would distinguish between support risk and strategic risk. Oracle has extended premier support for Hyperion, so customers do have time. But having time doesn't necessarily mean standing still is the lowest-risk option.

The bigger issue is what accumulates around HFM. Over many years, organizations can build complex estates around the consolidation capability in HFM. They add planning processes, maybe [Essbase], data integrations, a number of reporting tools, custom processes, possibly a lot of Excel spreadsheets. The longer that continues, the more knowledge becomes concentrated in a relatively small number of people, and the harder the transformation can become.

There's also an opportunity cost question. While you're continuing to operate that environment, finance expectations are moving toward more connected processes, faster decision-making, and, again, automation and AI.

So I'd characterize the risk differently. It's less about HFM suddenly disappearing and more about postponing a transformation you're likely to have to address eventually. Support may buy you time. It doesn't necessarily buy you transformation.

Trevor: Transformation and opportunity cost were a couple of key things you brought up there. Even though we're all from OneStream, I think it's important for people on the call to know that we bring experience. I spent many years at Hyperion myself. So we bring experience with HFM, in some cases very deep experience, but now also with OneStream. Nick, what drew you to OneStream?

Nick: For me, it came down to the customers. After many years in this market, you learn to distinguish between a great technology story and actual customer success. What impressed me about OneStream was seeing organizations move from legacy environments like HFM and others, and use that moment to do something much bigger: simplifying their finance landscape and then continuing to build on that investment.

I was also really attracted by the culture behind that success. OneStream has always set itself the goal of 100% customer success. I wasn't sure I believed it before I joined, but you could see that customer focus reflected in the high renewal rates, the positive reviews, and the way customers continue to expand their use of the platform. That customer momentum and the ambition of those finance teams were probably the biggest reasons I wanted to be part of the OneStream story.

Trevor: I'll highlight the culture point too, since we've all had experience at Hyperion. If you loved the Hyperion culture, the Hyperion customers, and that product, what drew me to OneStream was both the product and that same culture. I've worked at 15 different companies in my career, and this is only the second place after Hyperion where [you don't have to struggle to get customers to be a reference]. They're actually ecstatic about what we're helping them solve and the transformations they're driving in their finance teams. You'll hear that as a common theme today.

Where Oracle Cloud fits, and where it may not

Trevor: Tina, I'm going to bring you into the conversation, since you're a recent addition to the OneStream team, within the last six months. You spent time as a controller and in internal audit, and over the last ten years at Oracle you were in presales and led presales teams for close and consolidation, as well as some of the ERP and other operational systems. You're very familiar with the Oracle Cloud solutions for close and consolidation. So with that as a backdrop: where do the Oracle Cloud solutions genuinely fit?

Tina: That's a great question. If you're heavily invested in an Oracle ecosystem already, whether you're on Fusion ERP, or in addition to Hyperion you've implemented some of the other modules within the EPM suite, then that might be a better fit for you. If your path forward really focuses on Oracle, then moving to Financial Close and Consolidation within EPM might be a better fit. Not a given, but a pretty good fit.

The other thing that comes to mind is that the Financial Close and Consolidation solution within Oracle has a lot of prebuilt structure and prebuilt capabilities. That was on purpose, to make it easier for customers to stand up. So if you have a simple consolidation process, not overly complex, then moving to the EPM solution could be a good fit. Those are the two areas where I see EPM being good for customers.

Trevor: You mentioned simple, less complex consolidation. Any other areas you've seen where moving to Oracle Cloud may not be a great fit?

Tina: I think it's important to take a look at your overall process. As Nick alluded to, and I'm sure Keith will talk about later, this is a great chance to reevaluate what you're doing and what you want to do moving forward.

If you look at Oracle EPM close and consolidation, you want to make sure it's able to handle your complexities. Because there's a lot of prebuilt functionality and structure, it might not be a good fit if you have a more complex process.

The other thing I'd say is that you may have a lot of rules and structure that's been built over time if you've been on Hyperion for a long time. Oracle does have a tool that can help you migrate, but only if you're on a newer version of Hyperion. If you have a lot of old structure, or you're on an older version, you may not be able to migrate, and you may have to start from scratch anyway. At that point, I'd take a good look at your overall process and evaluate who is the best fit for you.

Trevor: Clearly, if you're on an older version, you'd have to take steps to get up to the right version to even be able to take advantage of that tool, which might push you into the "not a fit" category. From your perspective, what advice would you give people on the call to pressure test before they assume it's straightforward to move to the cloud EPM products?

Tina: The first thing that always comes to mind for me is dimensions, especially custom dimensions. With a prebuilt solution, they have predefined dimensions, and then I believe they have four available custom dimensions within Financial Close and Consolidation. That drops to three if you have multi-GAAP. So you want to evaluate what dimensions you'll need moving forward to look at your business the way you need to, and make sure the solution can accommodate them.

The second thing is integration. Just because modules are in the same suite doesn't mean they're using the same data. Within the EPM suite, they may still be pushing data from one solution to another, or loading it from ERP separately into Account Reconciliation, into Close and Consolidation, and into Planning. It's not necessarily using the same data. You definitely want to watch out for that, because it introduces more risk and more reconciliation. So again, look at what's best for your business and the future of your processes.

Trevor: I've said all along that slapping a common user interface on top of seven or eight different products does not make a platform, and it doesn't provide efficiency. You still have data gymnastics, data challenges, and timing challenges across processes. Tina, same question I asked Nick: why did you join OneStream?

Tina: As you mentioned, I was a controller, and we implemented Hyperion while I was there. We went from spreadsheets and all kinds of challenging manual processes into Hyperion, and it was a game changer for us, even though we only used it in a few small areas. Then when I went to Oracle and spent time in the EPM space, I really came to appreciate the solutions.

What I love about OneStream, and why I decided to join, is that OneStream has the Hyperion background, but corporate performance management is its focus. It's not just one part of a larger solution. And, as Nick mentioned about the customers, about a month into my OneStream journey I got to go to Splash, the annual user conference, and talk to actual customers about how they were using it. Hearing how it's changed how they work and how it's impacted their lives, I just think it's a great story. So I'm excited for what's ahead at OneStream.

What a move from HFM to OneStream actually takes

Trevor: Now let's get to the real nitty-gritty. If you're running HFM, you want to understand what it's really like, rather than hearing from the talking heads. Keith has real-world, hands-on experience with HFM from the very beginning, with OneStream, and with helping customers move from HFM to OneStream. Keith, when you get inside an HFM environment, as a former HFM person and now OneStream, what is familiar to you?

Keith: Keep in mind that our cofounders, Bob Powers and Tom Shea, are the creators of HFM and FDM respectively. When they built OneStream, they took the concepts they had pioneered, the ways the software addresses the problem, refined them, combined them into a platform, and implemented them on new technology.

So your way of working and the approach you use for consolidation are very similar, and you'll be very much at home. You're going to be working in a cube. You're going to create an entity dimension for consolidation, assign default currencies to those entities, and assign consolidation percentages. You're going to set up an account dimension and assign account types. You get first common parent eliminations out of the box. You'll be able to write sophisticated custom consolidation and translation rules, and you'll have a value dimension and a flow dimension that help you analyze what's happened in your consolidation all the way up. So it's completely familiar if you're coming from HFM into OneStream. Different technology, same approach.

Trevor: With that familiarity, what's new that you can take advantage of on the back of things that will feel comfortable?

Keith: What's new is that this is part of a much bigger whole. It's not a suite; it's a platform, where I don't have to go to a separate FDMEE, financial reporting, or planning tool. It's all one integrated tool with a common API backbone.

It's also a modern platform with much greater capacity, and it has modern features such as extensibility, which is the ability to have different levels of detail and different dimensionality in different parts of the application, instead of one data model that has to serve everyone. And things like relational blending, where I can seamlessly bring together data in tables with cube data.

Trevor: Ultimately, what people on the call really care about is: realistically, Keith, how long does it take to go from HFM to OneStream, and what does that process typically involve? How difficult is it going to be?

Keith: Of course, it depends. If you're happy with your HFM and you just want a risk-free move to a newer platform, we can absolutely do that, and that could conceivably take just a few weeks. I can take my metadata file from HFM, load it directly into OneStream, and OneStream converts it. We and all our partners have done this so many times that we all have conversion tools to make the process faster.

If you want to, as we recommend, take a step back, relook at your design, and rethink your consolidation process for your new platform, that could take several months. We have express solutions with prebuilt consolidation logic that can shorten that, but you're looking at a month or two at least.

Keep in mind also that, as with any conversion of an audited system, your go-live date will be affected by the calendar. You can't go live on a quarter end, and you'll have to factor in time for extensive UAT and at least one parallel. So the time I'm quoting is just design and build time.

Trevor: I want to reinforce something. Tina put prebuilt in the negative bucket, since it might limit your ability to cover complex consolidations. You mentioned our CPM Express capabilities, which are prebuilt. But with that prebuilt, we're not putting you in a box. You still have full flexibility to take advantage of all the complexity the OneStream solution can handle, and to grow beyond financial consolidation and close into areas like planning.

Keith, what are the biggest pitfalls you've seen, and how can teams avoid them as they look at a migration from HFM to a product like OneStream?

Keith: I'm not sure I'd call it a pitfall. I'd call it more of a lost opportunity. As I said earlier, OneStream is so much more capable that you really should take time to rethink your consolidation process to take advantage of all the new features. It has extensibility and much greater capacity. The design limitations you have in HFM don't exist in OneStream, and you should really take a strong look at that.

Trevor: From your experience working on projects with customers and getting their feedback, what are some moments or successes you'd like to share?

Keith: There are a lot. Two come immediately to mind. The first is workflows. HFM is old-style software. I'm working with a menu, sort of like Excel, where I have to train my users: to open a file, go to File, Open. It's up to the user to figure out the order in which they do things, and you have no way of knowing whether they've done things in the correct order or done the task properly.

In OneStream, the backbone of the architecture is workflow: the ability to specify each step a user takes, what screens and reports they see, validate that they've completed a task before moving on to the next, and have a hierarchy of approval built into the tool. So you're not teaching all users how to use the product so much as just their individual workflow, which makes user adoption much easier and results in much higher satisfaction.

The second is the marketplace. Because it's a platform, there are many free, prebuilt tools that extend the solution. If I have a problem, I can look in the marketplace and see if there's a solution available. For instance, beyond the workflows, if you want a sophisticated Gantt chart that manages your whole close, there's a solution for that. If you want more editing capability than the built-in dimension editor gives you, there's another solution for that. You can just download it and leverage work other people have done.

Trevor: I'll reinforce that. When we talk about downloading solutions from our Solution Exchange, or marketplace, some people may think: that's another application where I have to rebuild my chart of accounts and my entity structure. That's not the case with OneStream. Think of it like the App Store or Google Play Store: when you download something, it's embedded directly into the phone, or in this case directly into OneStream. It leverages all the configuration Keith talked about, the chart of accounts, legal entity structure, and data loads, because those are core parts of the OneStream platform shared by any solution you download.

Lessons from 450+ HFM to OneStream migrations

Trevor: We've talked a couple of times about our experience with over 450 successful HFM to OneStream migrations. Nick, I'll start with you, and then Keith can chime in. Can you comment on that number, the experience and lessons we've gained that have helped make all 450 of those customers happy, referenceable OneStream customers?

Nick: We're well over 450 organizations that have moved from Oracle Hyperion to OneStream, and we're very proud of that. We also have customers who have moved from other solutions, like SAP EPM.

Many of these customers have reached the same conclusion. Moving away from legacy technology is not simply about replacing what they have today. It's an opportunity to modernize finance and move to a platform that can support continued innovation and their evolving business needs. It's really about setting themselves up for what comes next.

That's why the value goes well beyond replacing HFM. Many customers have used their move to OneStream as a catalyst to modernize and connect broader finance processes, extending from financial consolidation into financial close. Keith talked about workflow and task management, but we've also seen many organizations benefit from unifying account reconciliations and transaction matching as part of the close process, as well as extending into planning, forecasting, and more reporting capabilities.

The result has been a more unified approach to finance, fewer fragmented processes, and greater opportunity to improve efficiency, control, and agility. We're all having to move much faster, and requirements are moving quickly. So I'd encourage those of you listening to explore our customer stories and hear directly from organizations that have made the move from Oracle Hyperion or other legacy solutions to OneStream.

Trevor: Keith, anything to add?

Keith: Just to reiterate that HFM is in our DNA. Our founders created HFM and FDM. Many of our consultants and our partners' consultants come from an HFM background and know and love HFM. We know the HFM pain points, and we know how to solve them in OneStream. And having done it so many times, we have conversion tools and helpers to make the process go faster.

Audience questions

Trevor: We have a little time, so let's take some questions from the audience. Tina, I'll start with you. "We're several HFM versions behind. Does that change our path?"

Tina: As I mentioned earlier, I believe Oracle does have a migration tool to migrate from HFM to FCC. However, you have to be on at least release 11.1.2.3. If you're on anything older than that, the migration tool won't work, and you'll basically have to look at a redesign and reimplementation. Or I guess you could pay and take the time to upgrade to a newer version of HFM first. Honestly, I don't know that that makes a lot of sense. Keith, feel free to jump in from the consultant side.

Keith: From an HFM to OneStream standpoint, your version of HFM doesn't matter.

Trevor: Next question. Nick, I'll start with you. "We run multiple HFM instances and have some complex models. Does that make it harder?"

Nick: We're completely accustomed to that. We meet a lot of customers who have had multiple application instances, and for many of them it wasn't by choice. They needed multiple instances just to handle the complexity in the business. I can think of one organization that had 13 separate instances of HFM, and they were able to bring those into one single OneStream solution that could handle the dimensionality and all the complexity of their organization, and allow them to grow and do additional things. So it doesn't necessarily make it harder. OneStream can handle that level of complexity. Keith, I'm sure you could add to that.

Keith: I do think it's a harder conversion, but with a much greater payoff. As you say, it can probably become one application in OneStream, or multiple applications can become one in OneStream. Remember that OneStream has extensibility and far greater data and processing capacity, so designs I would never imagine in HFM are easily possible in OneStream.

Trevor: I'll reinforce what you've all said about opportunity cost. With a move to a real platform like OneStream, you can continue to extend the solution. There's familiarity, but the volumes you can handle are very different from what existed in the past. So I'd encourage people on the call to think about that opportunity cost, and what may be missed if you decide to stay versus looking for an alternative, whatever that alternative is.

Keith, here's a deeper question. "How much of the HFM logic and structure carries over versus needing to be rebuilt?"

Keith: Because of the common lineage, almost all of it can carry over, if that's what you choose to do. We have to convert scripts, but the metadata, the basic approach, and other things can stay the same if that's what you choose.

Trevor: But back to the point about opportunity cost. A lift and shift may get you there quicker, but does it give you the opportunity to stretch into other areas that drive additional efficiencies for your finance teams? Or, as Nick said, to step back and really think about a real transformation, and set yourself up for the future on a platform that has AI and provides an opportunity for huge reductions in manual activity and more efficient close processes?

Keith, you also touched on volumes a couple of times. "How do we get our historical data moved if we decide to make a move to OneStream?"

Keith: There are two types of move. One is the conversion I do as part of the implementation, where I extract the data from HFM, recalculate it, and run it through the full consolidation calculation in the new tool to make sure it ties back to the old. That's a difficult and time-consuming process, and usually you do one, maybe two years of that.

Then there's pure archiving, where I have maybe five or six more years I want to get out of HFM and bring into OneStream, while still being able to query and reference it. Because of the common lineage, it's very easy to archive data in OneStream. You can keep your full structures and bring the data over with all the calculations exactly as they are. It's a fairly easy process. We had a client who archived twelve years of HFM data with very little support from us once it was set up.

We're very confident that if you choose to migrate from HFM to OneStream, you'll be able to decommission your HFM at the end of all this. You won't have legacy data left in HFM.

Trevor: A related question on data integration. "How is data integrated into OneStream from multiple sources, and how is that different from FDMEE?"

Keith: It's conceptually the same, except it again highlights that OneStream is a platform. All the data quality tools and all the scripting you can do in FDMEE exist in OneStream, and if you choose, you can convert your scripts. But it's a single tool in OneStream. If a script needs to understand the data model in OneStream, it can, because it's one tool, whereas I can't do that easily in FDMEE. I'm also writing one set of code with one API; I'm not having to go into Python and do something else. So it's conceptually the same, but on a platform where much more is possible.

Trevor: Nick, you brought up SAP earlier. Here's a question that's not surprising, since some people may have joined to hear from our experience even though they're not on HFM. "We're not on HFM, but another legacy solution for close and consolidation. Would that migration be similar, and what additional advice would you have?"

Nick: We're focused today on the HFM install base, but we have customers from many different technologies. We have a lot of SAP EPM customers, both BPC and BFC, who have moved to OneStream, and equally IBM Cognos customers and customers on other consolidation tools. So we're certainly familiar with moving customers from other consolidation tools.

As Keith outlined, there are some obvious benefits to the Hyperion heritage coming into OneStream and how you can move from HFM to OneStream. But we have a lot of customers willing to talk about how they've moved from those other solutions. Keith, you can perhaps dive into that. It is a different process.

Keith: Just to reinforce it: we've migrated many tools into OneStream, so we have that experience and those accelerators. But the truth is, if you're coming from HFM, you get a great deal, because the tools share that lineage. It's just a much easier process.

Trevor: I'll squeeze in one more. "Given that we'll continue to have multiple local ERPs and a separate FP&A platform, what tangible benefits would OneStream provide compared with HFM?" It's a very common question, so let me address it quickly, and we can follow up with more detail afterward.

First, the opportunity to get a best-in-class consolidation system. I've worked at most of the companies in this space, and the volumes, the capability, and the familiarity make our consolidation engine one of the best in the breadth and depth of what it can cover.

Second, the opportunity to think beyond consolidation to the entire close process. We can help unify everything from transactions to consolidation through reporting and disclosures, all within the same platform, not separate applications: same metadata, data loaded once and used across all of those processes, common workflows, and common reporting and analysis capabilities.

And third, we have customers that are fully on the OneStream platform, but also customers with multiple solutions. We talked about how easy it is to integrate data into OneStream because it's an integral part of the platform. So there's a future opportunity to consider collapsing planning into that same trusted data model. When you know where you are from an actuals perspective, or even a flash reporting perspective, you could immediately pivot to kicking off a forecasting and planning process on the back of the exact same data and metadata, to look at how to make up for gaps or capitalize on opportunities, without all the technical and data gymnastics you may have to do today. It comes back to the opportunity that might be available for you.

Closing

Trevor: We ran a little longer than some of our previous sessions, but I wanted to make sure we covered that question. Thank you, Nick, Tina, and Keith, for sharing your experiences and insights, and thank you to everyone for joining us today.

To stay connected with OneStream and learn more about starting your own HFM migration journey, check out the documents section in this webinar. You can also scan the QR code on screen to access our hub, where you'll find packaged customer stories of actual HFM to OneStream migrations, along with other assets, including one I find extremely valuable: our newest ebook on the modern financial close, a 2026 guide for finance leaders.

Keith: Thanks, Trevor.

Tina: Thank you, everyone.

Nick: Thank you, Trevor, and thanks, everyone, for joining.

Trevor: And thank you, everyone, for joining. Have a great day.