Product Manager's Corner

In inaugurating the first Product Management Corner article and on behalf of Oracle EPM Development, I’d like to extend our sincerest thanks to the ODTUG community for your continued and growing support for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management. The annual Kscope conference gets better and better every year, with the caliber of attendees, extensive tracks, comprehensive session content, broad networking opportunities, and growing partner solutions being unequaled.

I have been associated with Kscope since 2008, when Oracle Essbase, representing the only “Hyperion” product on the agenda, was added just a few months before the event. By the time the conference was held in June of that year, the registered attendees nearly doubled and Kscope took the next step in its transformation to also become a powerful learning-based conference for business users, in addition to the technical audience it catered to so well.

While that first Sunday Symposium focused on just one product in the Oracle EPM and BI family, it quickly expanded to two parallel symposiums (EPM and BI), with an “ESPN” hot-seat approach to giving the latest updates, strategies, and insight into what is going on in the Development kitchen. The symposium is where we not only get to share a lot of interesting and innovative projects we are working on, but we also get to see the passion and loyalty of our community. Where else would people give up their personal Sunday time to not only absorb the content but also contribute with their valuable feedback, especially in such a beautiful location as Hollywood, Florida? The Product Management and Development team always leave the conference with an added sense of pride, ideas, and drive to add additional value in your investments.

This year at the Sunday Symposium, we not only shared the new applications and enhancements for our on-premise customers but we also showcased what we are doing to bring EPM into the Oracle Cloud. Today, we have two Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings; Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service. The former is based on, but greatly enhanced by, the familiar Hyperion Planning platform, and the latter is a brand-new built-for-the-Cloud offering. Together, these form the Oracle EPM Cloud offering. The response from the market has been overwhelming, as the Oracle EPM Cloud is among the fastest-growing EPM products in terms of customer licensing and has extended EPM solutions to brand-new customers across all geographies, industries, and organizational sizes. The Oracle EPM Cloud customer deployments range from users in the double digits to over 1,000.

The value to being in the Cloud extends to both the functional users as well as IT. IT gets to focus on critical items such as data sourcing, security, and monitoring. The functional users get the latest product releases, advancements in user experience, comprehensive help (videos, documentation, embedded, etc.), pre-built/extensible content, and quick time to value. These benefits are significant, as you no longer have to go thru the delays, time, and expense to maintain and upgrade your on-premise systems. Your chosen implementer, whether internal or through our partner network, can take advantage of the latest innovations to deliver cutting-edge and customized solutions to enhance the performance of your business, and your business can focus on what it does best.

And if you were in attendance at the Kscope15 EPM Symposium, you know we are far from done. By the time we meet again in 2016, we will have launched many more SaaS offerings in the EPM Cloud. While we gave glimpses of these at Kscope, they had broader coverage at Oracle OpenWorld 2015. We look forward to sharing more information in future articles and seeing you at Kscope16 in my beautiful hometown of Chicago!

To learn more about Oracle EPM Cloud, please visit https://cloud.oracle.com/epm-cloud.

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