Oracle Hyperion Reviews

Functionality-wise, it is what they say it is. It is the best in class, but it all ties back to your users. If your users are completely enamored with Excel spreadsheets, then breaking those habits is hard. What you really get is data governance and control. We haven't gone to the cloud service yet, so I really can't comment on that, but at the end of the day, depending on your users, the ability to forecast long-term is a great feature. We're in the process of putting that in, and some of the stakeholders are really excited about that functionality, but it's all about data governance. A company that was trying to do this on the cheap using an Oracle Essbase cloud service got data corruption in one month because they didn't have the necessary security, and people were overriding other people's plans.

From going from level one to four, they've done a lot with driving the user to control what they're doing versus having a dependency on an administrator to drive data movement. Again, it's all predicated on how your planners want to use the application. You can give them all the tools, but if they don't engage in that type of planning, then you can have a Cadillac system. If they're only going to use 10% of it, you're not going to drive that value.

All the planning systems out there are great. It doesn't matter which company you use. They're all great. I've seen demonstrations on a number of them, but it all boils down to the culture within the organization itself to use that functionality, understand it, and help drive it. I've had Oracle salespeople do demonstrations, and it looked really good. We get it on board, and everybody still sticks to their Excel spreadsheets because companies are a lot more complex than what you could deliver on the planning system. So, there should be more education on the capabilities, and there should be more understanding of organizations in terms of the way they access the data in order to plan. Because my organization is complex and there are different data streams, they don't bolt into Hyperion very well. You still have to extract the information and load it in, which is really difficult, especially if you have older systems or if you're going from a mainframe system for some of that information because there is no application out there now that's bolting on the mainframe systems.

We have the full suite with consolidation. We have Hyperion Financial Management. Our challenges, if we ever have one, are really on the server-side, because you're dealing with SQL Server, as well as your Essbase Server, especially for planning. If those servers go down within the organization, it's not Hyperion's fault. It's your own organization's fault. So, from a stability perspective, it's extremely stable. If you're going to go to the cloud, the internal factors that could trip you would go away. You would be within Oracle's ecosystem, and you don't have to spend the money to have a DBA managing your application on the backend. My team is a bit of a hybrid. We report to the business, but we do all the setups within the application itself.

I have rarely interacted with them. At least with Hyperion planning, we've been pretty self-sufficient, and we haven't hit a bug. 

If you read their game plan, they're pushing everybody to the cloud. We're not on the cloud application yet. We're on an older version that's being retired.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

At our organization, the solution is deployed on-premises. We work in the mining business, and a lot of restructuring needs to be translated into our planning. We have a lot of cubes in Oracle Hyperion, and we manage a lot of business units. The primary use case is to translate our processes and environment into forecasts and budgets.

Oracle Hyperion helped make things work faster in our company.

The calculation power is the most valuable feature.

The reporting could be improved. It is challenging to do reporting on Oracle Hyperion if you're not an expert, and you may have to use an add-on to simplify it. For example, our company uses financial reports, and it's challenging for people that don't have all the technical skills.

This solution requires a lot of specialized people because it's not very easy to navigate. More specifically, you may need a specialist or expert in formulas and dealing with the interface. In addition, it requires multiple sheets and many templates.

Additionally, it is not very secure and does not have all the required security.

We have been using this solution for the past 12 months.

Oracle Hyperion is generally stable. There are minor issues, but in general, it is a stable platform. 

We have a plan to increase the usage of Oracle Hyperion. We may upgrade to Oracle Essbase 21c, OneStream, or even use our own platform.

I have used Oracle's technical support to settle several tickets. If I were to rate the technical support, I would rate it five out of five.

Positive

We only used Excel in the past.

We completed the deployment in-house and also completed an upgrade that took us four months.

There has been a return on investment since we started using this solution.

The initial setup was complicated. I would rate the setup a four out of five in terms of the level of complication. You need to understand how calculations work in Oracle Hyperion and know information about the rule files.

I don't have all the data on licensing costs because another business area in my company makes those deals. However, I know we currently have an SLA, and as far as I am aware, it's just the standard licensing fee and no other cost.

I have thought about using PowerBI for reporting purposes. However, I'm only familiar with Oracle Essbase 21c for financial reports. In-house, we have a platform developing house similar to Oracle Planning, where we get all the information from the system.

We have hundreds of users of this solution in the company, and we have two environments. In terms of maintenance in our data center, we have three people in charge of the infrastructure and seven functional actors that deal with formulas or cubes. 

I would like to see features from Oracle Essbase 21c on Oracle Hyperion in the next release. Oracle Essbase 21c is web-based and helpful in managing all the cubes. However, my role is more admin-focused, so I can't speak about the technical maintenance on Oracle Essbase 21c.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the product involves supporting customers in constructing forecasting models within the Oracle Hyperion platform.

With this solution, logic, calculations, and other functionalities are centralized, eliminating reliance on specific personnel. Additionally, employees gain value from working with advanced products like Hyperion, enhancing their skill sets.

The cloud storage engine is the most valuable financial analysis feature, and it is highly powerful and has useful workflows.

They could support machine learning algorithms for the product. Such functionality would make operations easier for finance executives in the next five years. They are trying to edit the functions, but automation learning is moving at a fast pace. Oracle must quickly implement or provide these features as customers increasingly demand them. This is the biggest trend emerging from the customer side.

We have been using Oracle Hyperion for 15 years.

The stability of the on-premise versions is quite impressive.

We have more than 20 Oracle Hyperion users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The initial setup is straightforward, particularly when working with a consultant company that has already explained its use case.

The deployment process typically starts with understanding customer requirements through a discovery phase. Once the scope and requirements are agreed upon, the solution is implemented. Data validation, especially for financial closure, is conducted to ensure accuracy. Finally, the solution is deployed to production.

The pricing model for the cloud setup is subscription-based, typically monthly. On the other hand, Oracle on-premise is user-based, meaning organizations pay upfront for an annual subscription, depending on the number of users they require. It might be considered relatively costly compared to some alternatives.

The platform's data integration is indeed powerful. We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning.

The impact on financial processes is significant. It dramatically reduces the time required. Without such solutions, financial consolidation or closure may take around ten days. However, with Oracle Hyperion, for instance, there are real use cases where customers can close their month or quarter within a maximum of five days.

One of the main challenges has been related to the requirements we receive from customers. Some of the features and functionalities they require are not available in the cloud version of Oracle Hyperion.

Besides recommending the product itself, it's crucial to emphasize the importance of aligning with a reputable consulting company with experience in multiple projects.

I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We are using it for cloud functionality and the accessibility of the service as a solution to a wider audience.

We are very happy with the product and we are beginning to move into OneStream as well.

One of the problems we have had with technical support when we are on a project, is we need technical support from senior-level technicians instead of being assigned, junior-level technicians. What I like is to have everything on one platform and not in different modules like Oracle Hyperion. For example, segregated planning and HFM consolidation. OneStream has everything together on one platform. There is less data movement, and with Oracle Hyperion, you have to move data between modules. I think that would be an improvement if they can merge those products. But it has been like that for so long I do not know if Oracle Hyperion has the appetite to do that.

I have been working with Oracle Hyperion for over twenty years.

We have found there to be excellent stability with Oracle Hyperion. We know that the latest version always has some bugs to work out and so we use the version before the latest one.

I have found Oracle Hyperion to be scalable. We are currently using it for medium to large corporate companies.

They respond quickly to our initial tickets. Sometimes we struggle on existing projects because Oracle Hyperion would assign us a junior technical support individual on these calls instead of a senior technical support representative, and it may take a longer period of time to have it resolved.

I think Oracle Hyperion has a good solution in comparison to other market comparables.

The initial setup is very easy and took us around four to five months to deploy.

We did have help with the deployment of Oracle Hyperion.

I hear customers complain about the licensing structure. Oracle Hyperion's licensing structures are quite expensive for some companies, especially medium-sized companies because of the user-based license. 

Do not underestimate the importance of testing in your project plan. The rule of time is to use the same amount of testing time that you would use on development. That is not always possible in the project plan because customers will come with a timeline and you have to squeeze where you can, and most of the time you actually sacrifice testing. So try and fight for more testing time, even if it extends the timeline. It is probably one of the top CPM products out there at the moment. I believe OneStream is making some headway. I think Oracle Hyperion has a challenge from OneStream at the moment, but Oracle Hyperion's still one of the top products out there. I would rate OracleHyperion a nine out of ten.

Oracle Hyperion is useful for financial reporting and budgeting. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

Oracle Hyperion's scalability could be improved. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable, but we are thinking of the cloud to improve scalability. 

There are about 700 users of Oracle Hyperion in my organization. We have plans to increase our usage: when the company grows, the system will grow also. 

The technical support is fine. Previously, the support exchanges with Oracle were difficult, but now it's much better. We manage most things without contacting Oracle. 

The installation is easy, but I'm the admin—we have a partner who manages the installation. I think it took about two to three days. 

For a technical team, we have two people who manage the worldwide financial information. 

We implemented this solution through a partner. 

We pay for licensing yearly. 

I rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten. We are satisfied with this solution and I would recommend Oracle to others. 

I work for an investment banking client. They use the solution to compute wealth-added numbers in Essbase. I get the data from different sources like Informatica, Upstream, and EDM. EDM is a kind of metadata management, and I get static data from EDM. In terms of data, I get the market values and transactions. I get the market data from EDM regarding tax information, unlevered beta, and all such parameter information.

From there, Oracle Hyperion will consume this data, run some calculations, and compute the wealth-added number, which has a certain formula. It all happens under lower granularity. Once the data has been loaded and calculated, it will be aggregated to the top level. Once the aggregation happens, users access the data using the Smart View Excel add-in.

They connect to the Essbase application using the Smart View Excel add-in and retrieve the data. Oracle Hyperion has the capability to hold data from the last ten years for historical analysis and retrieval purposes. The solution has a simple use case which is not very complex.

Oracle Hyperion is an advanced analytical calculation engine that can handle aggregation. From a user perspective, the solution can perform slice-and-dice operations and retrieve data. It is a traditional legacy application.

I mostly used Smart View, which does not have many great features compared to Qlik Sense. The solution's reporting and dashboards need improvement. Nowadays, all cloud technologies like Power BI and Qlik Sense can easily add new dimensions. However, doing the same in Oracle Hyperion is not simple and needs a lot of enhancements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Customers are nowadays moving to good solutions in the open system that offer less cost.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for 14 years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven to eight out of ten.

The solution's scalability is fine. One client from the investment banking industry was using the solution. In terms of increasing the number of applications, I rate the solution's scalability a six to seven out of ten. Regarding business requirements, complexity, and adding some new features, I would not recommend Oracle Hyperion to others. I rate Oracle Hyperion a four to five out of ten from this perspective.

Sometimes, the technical support is bad and takes a long time, but sometimes it is okay. If you want a patch from Oracle, they make you do different things, and sometimes you may not get concrete updates. I recently faced an issue where I was not able to download the patch from Oracle, and it was an issue with the portal.

I asked the technical support person to give me an alternative way to provide the patch manually, which he couldn't do because of their policy. I faced certain challenges. Other than that, I used to fix data issues, data failures, and environment issues without interacting with the technical support team.

I rate the solution's technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

The solution's deployment time depends on the complexity of the project. We need to develop an application based on the client's requirements. For on-premises, we already have an existing setup for Essbase. If we are looking for any version upgrade, we need to take the new VMs, install them, and configure them to the latest version of Oracle Hyperion Essbase.

Then, we need to migrate our applications. That's an upgrade project that will take around six months. This time may vary in the cloud environment. I am talking about the on-premises upgrade process, which involves moving an existing application to a different version. New development projects or small projects will take around six months, whereas bigger projects may take one year. It all depends on the kind of business requirements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Oracle Hyperion should upgrade itself by seeing how other products offer lower prices. Cost matters for an organization when setting up the complete environment. Whether companies want to use the product for bigger or smaller requirements, they have to pay the licensing costs based on the number of users.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine to ten out of ten.

I mostly use an Oracle Hyperion Essbase product, and the latest version I worked on is 11.2.11. Oracle Hyperion has operating and capital expense module features that will be helpful in budgeting. Any organization can use the solution's planning module to plan its budget for the next six months or one year based on current data and upcoming trends.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

This solution allows our users to do quarterly budget forecasts and load information for the next one to five years.

This solution provides a more structured methodology for doing analysis than a tool like Excel. It creates a central database that keeps all information in one place. 200 spreadsheets can be replaced by one repository, multidimensional database. 

Hyperion Planning provides pre-made forms, that make data input easy and shows users step-by-step what needs to be done for the forecast.

The forecasting of values could be simplified in this solution.

This is a scalable solution. It is possible to have thousands of users and store large amounts of data.

Our experience with the support team was not great.

Neutral

The setup was fairly complex. Besides needing servers, software needs to be installed and customized to work efficiently. You need to ensure everything works together and data moves correctly. Web servers have to be running and optimized.

To get a full license, which gives you access to most of the different Hyperion programs, it costs $2000 to $2500 a month.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution primarily for financial planning and forecasting, to determine how much cash flow is required on a monthly basis.

The roll-up potential of the product is very good, meaning we have detailed information and we want it to be summarized, based on geography, different product lines, or different charts of accounts in the general ledger. It rolls up the information in a very concise way. This makes it easy to understand the overall performance for its forecasting aspects, either quarterly reporting, year-to-year, or month-to-month reporting.

Configuration is a little complex, it's not very easy. The solution is integrated with Essbase and there are not many users of the Essbase database.

If they can provide different modules for each subject area, like supply chain, for inventory forecasting or for order management forecasting, it would make each subject area easier to manage.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years. 

After setup, the solution was stable, it performs well and delivers what we expect from it. 

It's not scalable. It's not scalable. We are moving away from it, with the ERP cloud migration, we will retire this product.

There are over 50 Oracle Hyperion users in our company.

Before using Oracle Hyperion I used Aprimo, a Teradata product. 

Aprimo is very fast, so if we are using a structured dataset it is unbeatable. It's very fast and very easy to set up. It has different modules depending on what kind of forecasting you want to do, whether that's related to planning, to the supply chain, to order management, or to inventory management.

In Hyperion, we don't have those modules, it's complete customization, and it's basically for finance only. These are the basic differences.

Aprimo is expensive, Oracle Hyperion is cheap.

The initial setup was 10 years ago and I wasn't with the company then so it would be difficult to say how much time it took, but we talk about monthly or yearly deployment.

I distinctly remember teams talking about it, it was not easy, and the team used to call it a black box. They called it that due to the number of abstraction layers between data, so nobody knew how it handled the data sets.

The solution was implemented via an in-house team.

The solution is affordable.

We will continue using the solution for now but we will definitely implement a different solution in the future. 

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

I'm the subject matter expert of the finance team, so in finance, we have a vice president who is actually head of the finance dataset. He reports directly to the CEO and is a big fan of Hyperion. He uses it for planning and forecasting each month, with a team of 14 or 15 core members, all of whom use Hyperion.

We also have a sales team and they use the Hyperion datasets for product discounting, based on the previous months track record of customers, they give discounts to the customers.