Oracle Hyperion Reviews

We used another product that was Excel based previously, but Planning is more on the web and lightweight, so you don’t have to worry about the Excel versions. It’s also centrally managed.

The biggest issue we have had for end users was that we lost control of functionality. Some of the problems we have had have since been fixed, but we are having issues with tabbing in all directions and scrolling through in ADF. They fixed this in a simplified interface, but it only lets you launch one application at a time. We cannot move to that interface because we are dependent on the shared workspace launching multiple planning applications.

I’ve used Planning for four years.

The product is more stable than our last solution. Initially, you will have problems, but once you settle, you settle down.

We came from 11.1.2.1 and upgraded to 11.1.2.4. We scale in horizontal multiple planning instances. We don’t have insight into how it was doing in terms of load balancing, but sometimes we go to equal memory use rather than the CPU usage. There is no way to track it, but it’s easy to scale out. The difficult part in 11.1.2.4 where we are seeing a performance issue right now is where we have multiple instances. We have them both up and running, but there are issues.

If it is a priority one ticket, they tend to have the information. If they already have the knowledge to help us, the issue flows through. They don’t have information support though, so there can be weeks or months of back and forth. I also go to the Oracle community when I check for batches of the latest things. There is some useful information and Community is an easy tool.

We did a non product replace upgrade because we are not replacing the hardware infrastructure. We also did a parallel enrollment running because we did not want to take a risk. The parallel enrollment ran with a fresh install from 11.1 to 1 and we then went our own way because Oracle told us that we shouldn’t migrate directly from 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.4. We moved the data when we went live and all the facts came through.

Based on the number of products available right now, I definitely think this is one of the good products. They might have issues in the current version, but hopefully those will get fixed soon. The simplified interface is coming up to level but we may still have gaps on the workspace with that simplified interface.

My primary use case of this solution is as a full EPM shop, with HFM ,planning and FDMEE reports, as well as all the features available under the EPM umbrella.

There is room for improvement in the on-premises software, which doesn't have as many features as the cloud version, such as the EPBS features or the ability to edit metadata for HFM. There are also a number of bugs and issues present in the product.

This solution's stability is a little problematic - every time we go to a new version, there are bugs and issues, and we don't always get a quick solution or support from Oracle. 

Scalability is one of this solution's big plus points.

The support could be improved as service requests can sometimes take a very long time to be dealt with - we have some SRs that are a year old with no solution. In addition, the quality of the answers from the support team is not always good - sometimes we've had scenarios where we've had to ask the same question repeatedly without getting a useful answer.

Prior to Hyperion, we used Oracle OFA. We moved over to Hyperion after OFA was decommissioned.

The complexity of the setup depends on the application being worked on - some are quite complicated, others are easier.

I would rate our ROI as three out of five.

As long as you are designing the product correctly in the current matter, it should work well. How you design the product should be the most important element of your implementation. The design of the applications is variable - some are well-designed, some are not. Overall, I would rate this solution as six out of ten.

I've been involved in implementing the solution for past clients.

The Hyperion product is designed for performance management, enterprise performance management, and it is applications. It has got write-back and it's got workflow. It's got built-in best practices for taking care of the management procedures, for example, budgeting, planning, and forecasting. It can also be used for financial consolidation - the whole process, including disclosure management, tax reporting, et cetera. It offers a lot of business process features.

In contrast, BI is for anybody that wants to use a lot of information, interrogate it and look at it from various perspectives, but don't want to use it for a business process. We use BI for information purposes and analytic purposes only. It does not have write-back capabilities. It is not something where you can say, "Okay, I can see that I've sold 10 products. Let me see what is going to happen if I sell 16 products in the next five months." You can't do that with BI. You can with Hyperion.

Their latest trend and the most modern approach is to combine BI with Enterprise Performance Management. After the process that you've completed, you want to have BI type of reporting. This will give you the best of both worlds, if the trend continues. You want a data model that makes provisions for that type of analysis and reporting that you want to do. 

For instance, financial consolidation. You can take all the information from the various businesses that you have (even different types of businesses or geographical areas). You can consolidate that, and apply accounting rules to it and do some analysis on it once you start your financial consolidation. That is where the BI comes in.

However, in saying that, the commonality that you have is the nature of the data. The way that the data is structured is common across enterprise performance, management, and business intelligence.

The solution is quite mature.

One can see that it's a mature product because it addresses all the requirements that you must have for financial consolidation and for budgeting and planning. It's really easy to use.

From a business intelligence (BI) angle, it's only a small part of what Hyperion does.

The solution is about to cease to exist, so it doesn't really matter if they add anything to it. It's at end-of-life.

Oracle's strategy is to put those clients that are using Hyperion at the moment onto the cloud, through a new software. Companies will be able to have the cloud software but have the option of on-premise. 

Due to the rich functionality and the breadth of the functionality that it provides, the technical architecture of the solution is quite complex. That is maybe one of the reasons why that Hyperion or Oracle is taking some of the products that have become too complex in the architecture and have decided to rewrite it and put it in the cloud. 

I've been working with the solution for well over a decade. It's been about 15 or 16 years or so at this point.

The solution is quite stable. Very notable and large organizations are able to use it without any trouble, even if they are working in different currencies and across countries.

The solution scales very well.

It is enterprise-class software and typically used by clients that have got massive amounts of data and also hundreds of users. It will handle much more, especially on the financial consolidation side. One of the biggest financial consolidation communities operating in Hyperion is a shipping company that has got businesses in every country in the world. They've got close to 300 users, which is very big for a financial consolidation application. They also have distributed across different currencies, et cetera, and the solution is able to handle it all.

Thousands of companies use the solution, and many have anywhere from 10 to 300 users, or more. 300 users would indicate the company and the solution is scaled quite extensively.

Oracle could do a bit more to support the client. 

The solution is very easy to use and therefore the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

In terms of deployment, for small organizations, it might only take three months or so. For a very large organization, you are looking at a deployment time of approximately nine months.

There are annual licensing costs associated with the solution.

Some people may consider the solution to be expensive, however, for all that it does, anything similar would require the licensing of more than one product.

We don't have a business relationship with Oracle. 

I'm not actually an end-user, however, I have been involved in providing the software and installing it and implementation projects and so on. I've got customers that are using these products and I've been involved with various aspects of these products.

The Oracle Hyperion products also differ slightly. The cloud products differ from on-premise products.

While our on-premise version is 11, we're also using the latest cloud. I'm not sure of that version as it's constantly getting updated.

The solution is at end-of-life and Oracle may only maintain the product until 2030 before moving everyone onto a new solution on the cloud. It's my understanding the new solution will be called Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close.

As the solution is to be discontinued, we'd most likely recommend another Oracle product. We'd likely recommend Oracle FCCS.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature in our experience is the user interface. We've found it really useful as an add-on for the financial part of Excel because it's functionality is geared towards finance users. Our finance users tend to like anything that can make their work inside Excel easier and more efficient.

It empowers users to perform ad hoc analyses themselves rather than having to go to IT or somewhere else. That makes it much more efficient for our users to do their jobs because they have access to data analysis in front of them instead of having to find that information elsewhere.

Oracle should have provided better documentation, and should update it more often. Right now, the documentation is not easy to understand and makes Hyperion that much less user-friendly.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

I think that Hyperion is, traditionally, very complex. It always seems to be buggy to a degree. We're always finding something that doesn't work quite the way we want and expect. But in terms of overall stability, it's very stable.

There are definitely certain limits. I'd say that it's not very scalable.

The initial setup wasn't not very straightforward. Installing Hyperion products requires a lot of effort and a lot of technical knowledge.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

The product itself, right now, especially on the Hyperion planning side, is the industry leading software for what it does. Although it's buggy, I think that's as far as you can get on the enterprise solutions. This is way better than anything else out there.

Our primary use case for Oracle Hyperion was planning and budgeting.

My role in the company is on the support side.

This is a customizable product. Our implementation was designed to fit our needs.

The user interface is in need of improvement. The forms should be more user-friendly.

Initially, we had some integration issues. However, these were solved after we submitted a couple of service requests.

We were using Hyperion for approximately eight years.

As of last week, we no longer use the original Oracle Hyperion. We have moved to the cloud version of the product.

Overall, the stability was okay. We did not have to raise many issues with support.

Scalability-wise, Oracle Hyperion is okay.

We did not have to raise many issues with support because we were only using the planning and budgeting features. We did initially have some integration issues and these were solved after we set up a couple of service requests.

Overall, the support is okay.

We were using Oracle Hyperion but have transitioned to the Oracle EPM Planning Cloud.

We switched because the support was ending and we decided to move to the latest version.

The deployment was done by a third-party implementation provider.

As of now, the Oracle Hyperion product is out of support, so I would not recommend it to anyone. Anybody that has it will not be supported by Oracle.

For anybody who is still planning to implement this product, my advice is to consider their needs during the initial implementation phase. The one that we were using was designed to fit our needs and anybody who plans to use this product should identify what forms and screens they will need. That is configurable at the beginning.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The ability to lock and send data as well as the flexibility of user security are two very important aspects of the product.

The partitioning option between databases allows for users to enter data one time, versus copying data lots of times from one cube to another. This has saved hours of maintenance and eliminates data integrity issues between the cubes.

The product could be improved with a better front end and user experience.

The solution has been in place for 12 years.  

We currently use the product for Financial Reporting, and from a functionality perspective, I would rate the product an 8/10 (once you understand it). As an intuitive, user friendly, GUI application, I would rate it a 4/10.

We have encountered no issues to date with deployment.

At one point, a data package had corrupted, causing our cube refreshes to fail. Having to restore from the backup but losing all the data inputs caused some business issues, but we were able to overcome them.

The Essbase engine does not start up automatically when the server reboots, causing users to log connection complaints.

To date, we have had no issues with an increase in data by date, or as we get newer version.

The initial set up was complex, as we were actually migrating from version 9 to version 11. The upgrade version path was not clear, and it was easier to recreate it.

We implemented it in-house.

We have a corporate global licensing agreement.

Finding highly qualified technical consultants for this application is difficult. There are other products with a larger community available for support and development.

We used It was used for budgeting, monthly management reporting, and forecasting.

Oracle Hyperion is an engine allowing you to build whatever you want on it.

Oracle Hyperion generally it's quite a complex architecture that is hard to maintain.

In our case, the issue was with the lack of people in Kazakhstan who know the product. there is a very limited number of resources available on the market.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for approximately 11 years.

I have found Oracle Hyperion to be stable.

The scalability of Oracle Hyperion is not that simple. However, for our usage, we do not have any performance issues. We didn't try to scale it that much.

Previously to using Oracle Hyperion we were using Excel.

The installation is at a medium difficulty level. It is similar to Oracle E-Business Suite.

Oracle Hyperion was implemented with the help of an integrator.

Oracle Hyperion is not an inexpensive solution.

I would advise others to use a cloud solution if there is one available.

I rate Oracle Hyperion a seven out of ten,

Essentially, we use Hyperion for financial reporting and tracking.

We like the reporting and tracking of financials.

I think the user interface could be made a bit easier and user-friendly.

The initial setup could be easier, and there could be more integration with more ERPs.

There is always room for improvement. 

There can be an improvement in many regards with the dimensions, the metadata, the interfaces, as well as the integration.

I have been working with Oracle Hyperion for two years.

We are using the financial management version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product.

There are more than 40 users in our organization who are working with this solution.

Technical support has been good.

Previously, we did not work with similar products.

As an administrator, I don't find it to be very difficult, but from the user's perspective, It could be simplified.

We don't need much maintenance because it's a stable product.

If the group is large enough, then I would recommend going ahead with this solution. It's a very good tool for reporting and consolidation.

I would rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten.