Oracle Hyperion: Stay, Migrate or Move?

The Current State of Oracle Hyperion

Oracle Hyperion has been a trusted name in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for many years. However, the evolving technology landscape means now is the time for you to assess whether staying put, migrating, or moving on is the best path forward for your organization.

Oracle Hyperion helped global organizations manage critical financial processes, such as close & consolidation, planning, budgeting, and reporting. For many organizations, Hyperion was the backbone of financial management. That landscape is changing fast.

In this ebook, we explore where Oracle Hyperion stands today and what the future holds for businesses still relying on Hyperion capabilities. While its legacy as a set of powerful on-premise EPM solutions is strong, many users are facing challenges with the upkeep. Rising maintenance costs, decreasing levels of service, a lack of modern capabilities, and the complexity of managing multiple modules are just some of the hurdles. Oracle has moved to a cloud-first strategy, so understanding how that impacts you as a current Hyperion user is key to choosing the best path.

Staying Put with Oracle Hyperion

If Oracle Hyperion still aligns with your business needs, upgrading to the latest version can bring continuity and extend the value of your investment. Staying put may give continuity to users and delay any required investment — but if there are missing capabilities, manual workarounds, new requirements, or service-level concerns, a solution for those issues gets delayed too.

Unclear Premier Support

For many years, premier support for the Oracle Hyperion suite was set to end in 2030. This date was later extended to 2032. While the date may be even further extended in the future, the message is not a positive one. Uncertainty now surrounds how long the Hyperion products will continue to be supported and whether more capabilities could be lost.

Oracle recently committed to ongoing support for the Hyperion EPM suite, providing all users with an upgrade to Oracle's long-term support release — 11.2. Since then, the support date has been extended several times, and the most recent update extends to 2035. The upgrade to version 11.2 did, according to an Oracle partner, result in a requirement for new hardware and the loss of several capabilities across the suite.

Lost Capabilities & Innovation

Upgrading to version 11.2 will involve significant cost. Your organization could also lose some capabilities, such as EPM Architect (EPMA), Hyperion BI+ Reporting, Disclosure Management, or some of the planning modules. Not to mention, Oracle's roadmap implies Oracle Hyperion 11.2 won't be on the strategic go-forward product set. Why does this fact matter? Well, what will you do when you need something this tool simply can't deliver? What happens when something breaks — especially during a critical period? Such questions are critical to explore before deciding your way forward.

The innovation in EPM technology is significant. Thus, fully evaluating the innovation within technology/software is important since you decided to purchase Hyperion. How has your business evolved in recent years? You must fully understand the advancements available to meet both current and future requirements, then bring these into any evaluation and value assessment.

Declining Resource Pool

Many Oracle Hyperion EPM customers are evaluating their options. As a result, the user community is gradually shrinking along with the partner community. Many longstanding customers have already moved to innovative EPM solutions such as OneStream.

A vibrant partner community is critical to continue supporting and extending the capabilities of Oracle Hyperion solutions. Yet many Hyperion partners who existed 10 years ago have now partially or fully converted to other EPM applications. Many experienced consultants have therefore retrained in other technologies, resulting in a reduced resource pool around the Oracle Hyperion EPM suite.

Building a Roadmap for Decision Making

Every organization's journey with Oracle Hyperion is different, so a clear roadmap is critical for making an informed decision on whether to stay, migrate, or move. Here are 10 recommended steps to help you build an effective roadmap for the best path forward:

1. Evaluate current processes — Document how Oracle Hyperion is being used (modules such as HFM, Planning, Essbase, FDM).
2. Consider the business objectives — Examine whether the growth and change in your organization require more from the EPM systems.
3. Identify gaps/challenges — Evaluate current pain points with Oracle Hyperion, such as performance, integration issues, functionality, or support service.
4. Stakeholder engagement — Engage key stakeholders across IT, finance, and operations to gather input and align on the best path forward.
5. Form a steering committee — Form a group to oversee the evaluation, ensuring all business perspectives are included.
6. Invest in demonstrations — Spend the time required to view and fully understand how the solution works and how it can handle core processes, taking a deep dive where needed.
7. Calculate the TCO/ROI — Compare all the costs of each option, including licensing, hardware costs, maintenance, and support costs.
8. Identify implementation partners — Consider working with partners early on who can help build realistic timelines for implementation, including data migration, system configuration, and testing.
9. Take multiple references — Ensure to speak to more than eight references for each option, given that the path forward is a big decision and major investment.
10. Effectively score the options — Develop scoring that accounts for costs, ROI/TCO, resources required, number of integrations, expected improvements, and usability.

Conclusion

If you're evaluating your current CPM technology to improve and enhance processes, consider the evolution of both your business and the available technology.

The decision to upgrade or migrate from Oracle Hyperion is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, the decision requires careful evaluation of your organization's unique needs, technology landscape, and future plans. Many advancements in technology have already been made possible, and more innovation forever looms on the horizon. Accordingly, you must move forward in terms of functionality and stop customizing a legacy solution to make up for its shortcomings. Doing so may make your processes more difficult to unravel in the future when the pressure of a more compelling event forces change. Many former Oracle Hyperion customers have found it critically important in their evaluations to move to a solution at the forefront of innovation. For that reason, OneStream has now become the trusted vendor of choice for more than 450 Oracle Hyperion customers.

In OneStream, the focus stays solely on EPM, and both users and the expert community will continue to grow well into the future. Employing such a platform for your organization will empower your finance team to Take Finance Further™ and move forward with confidence.

Ready to take the next step?

View our most recent global webinar to hear how one of our customers successfully moved from Oracle Hyperion, or explore our dedicated Hyperion-focused blogs for more.