Oracle PCMCS vs. Hyperion PCM: A Practical Comparison!

Ever since the release of Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management back in 2015, Alithya has released several blogs and blog series that have focused on the migration of client’s legacy Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) applications to the cloud. However, with the support for Hyperion 11.1.2.4 coming to an end at the end of 2021, clients have had to make some hard decisions over the past year; do they upgrade their current Hyperion infrastructure to 11.2, or do they migrate to the cloud?

Since the release of Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management and especially over the last year, Alithya has been involved in helping clients decide which course of action is best for them (upgrade vs. migrate to the cloud) and this blog series is a summation of the knowledge that has been learned from practical experience. If your company is still on the fence about which option is the best (you’re running out of time!!), these blogs will help you make the best decision. If you have already decided, hopefully, these blogs will validate that you made the best decision.

So, before we begin, let's set up some assumptions:

1. We will be focusing only on Profitability and Cost Management (PCM) – Of course, decisions to upgrade vs. migrate aren’t made solely based on PCM, but a blog series that goes through the entire EPM suite would be significantly longer.
2. We will only be looking at PCM Management Ledger Application Types – Older application types such as Standard Profitability and Detailed Profitability have a separate set of migration activities which we won’t be covering as they are not like for like migrations.
3. We will be breaking these blogs out into a four-part series to allow enough detail within each blog – In the first blog (this one!), we will cover ease of migration, the second will focus on performance comparisons between HPCM and Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management, the third will cover new and future feature availability and the final blog will wrap up the previous three and give a final determination.
    

Ease of Migration

A core question in any migration activity is “How easily can I migrate to the new environment?”. However, the answer to these questions isn’t always as obvious as it may seem and requires some additional follow up questions such as:

Do I Need to Invest in New Infrastructure to Support the Migration?

Let us deal with the on-premise HPCM first. Two options exist when looking at migrating from 11.1.2.4 to 11.2; 1) Upgrade your existing infrastructure or 2) procure new hardware. The choice of whether to upgrade or procure new hardware is a complex decision, but often it comes down to hard cash and effort! Servers and supporting infrastructure are expensive to purchase and maintain, and although upgrading existing infrastructure may seem enticing at first, considerations must made on how old the hardware is, whether the performance will continue to be sufficient in the future and how the cutover from the legacy 11.1.2.4 to 11.2 will be handled in Production. Either way, there will be a significant investment in the installation and configuration of 11.2 that must be taken into account with the overall project timelines.

On the Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management side, very little infrastructure is needed on the client-side. The only infrastructure that we generally recommend is the availability of a “Jump Box”. A Jump Box is a server that acts as a gateway to the cloud for integration and automation activities and generally requires low specifications in comparison to the infrastructure required to run HPCM. As Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management is a cloud application, all that is required is a licensing agreement with Oracle with the desired number of instances (if you are on Enterprise Licensing this becomes even easier!), a Jump Box, and you are set to go. No installation required and no complex cut-over plans juggling with when to upgrade existing hardware.

This one goes to Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management with little to no infrastructure investment required and/or installation and configuration.

How Easily can I Migrate my Current HPCM Applications?

As we are focused on PCM Management Ledger applications, the migration of models is quite similar between HPCM and Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management . The major difference is the way we migrate the different artifacts on-premise vs. the cloud.

For HPCM, we utilize Life Cycle Management (LCM) and need to ensure that we create a backup of each of the required artifacts for the Essbase application (both the master application and HPCM Essbase applications), HPCM applications, Security, and Reporting. No one-touch button exists that will migrate every required aspect of an application. We can utilize the Template method for HPCM, but there are considerations on the metadata management side that need to be taken into consideration as if you use the template method, the HPCM application will be created as a classic app and will not have a corresponding master application. When migrating HPCM applications, we also have to be aware of the sequence we import artifacts; for example, we first migrate the Master Essbase applications, manually create the HPCM application, deploy the application, then we can import Rules and Rule Sets and so forth.

For Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management, the migration is significantly easier, all we have to do is create a Template export of the existing HPCM application (without data), create a backup of the data, and we are good to import into Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management . The only element that cannot be migrated and must be created from scratch is security, so keep that in mind.

This one goes to Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management for ease of migration due to the fact I don’t have to migrate multiple elements separately and import them in a specific sequence.

What Data Integration and Automation do I Need to Migrate and/or Change to Support the New Environments and How Easily can that be Achieved?

One aspect that is often overlooked when assessing the ease of migration is how easy it is to migrate integration and automation. These elements sit outside of the HPCM and Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management applications but are critical to making the applications run at most clients.

For HPCM, the migration of the automation and integration can be quite straightforward. In most cases, existing integration and automation can simply be migrated and updated to accommodate the new environment. However, there is a catch! Some features such as the ability to create orchestrate jobs from Workspace have been removed from 11.2 so, alternatives for some features may be required, and, this is a biggy the HPCM Batch Client will not be supported going forward. So if you do have automation build on the HPCM Batch client, it will need to be rebuilt on REST API at some point.

For Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management , any integration and automation will generally need to be rebuilt. This isn’t as bad as it sounds as we can leverage Cloud Data Management (CDM) to replace any Financial Data Management Enterprise Edition (FDMEE) integration, and we can use either EPM Automate or the REST API to build the automation. We would recommend using EPM Automate rather than the REST API at most clients as it is simpler to understand and use, but there are some benefits that the REST APIs have over EPM Automate.

For me, this one is a tie. While HPCM is easier to migrate from an as-is state, the need to re-create the automation in REST API in the future can be difficult and is not without its challenges.

The Winner of the “Ease of Migration” Award Goes to...

The above questions are the most basic that we should be asking when looking at the Ease of Migration comparisons, but they do allow us to decide on a winner!

HPCM requires significant investment and effort from IT to potentially procure, install and configure the environment required to support 11.2, is harder to migrate, and provides no significant benefit in the level of effort required to migrate integration and automation elements when compared to Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management .

The chart below summarizes things up for us!

For comments, questions, or suggestions for future topics, please reach out to us at infosolutions@alithya.com.  Visit our blog regularly for new posts about Cloud updates and other Oracle Cloud Services such as Planning and Budgeting, Financial Consolidation, Account Reconciliation, and Enterprise Data Management.  Follow Alithya on social media for the latest information about EPM, ERP, and Analytics solutions to meet your business needs.