Author: Rich Pallotta, Performance Architects
Oracle’s Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) is a significant advancement in the Oracle EPM (Hyperion) product suite’s steady evolution and, like biological evolution itself, it seems we’re in one of those “fits-and-starts” phases. In the big picture, PBCS is doing great, but now that we’ve made that leap to the cloud, you may have noticed the ecosystem surrounding the solution has a bit of catching up to do. If you’ve taken a look at moving to PBCS, you’ve probably also had to consider what to do about data integration.
I it could just be Oracle’s way of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, but Oracle has many data integration choices with applications in the EPM stack: from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), to Financial Data Management Enterprise Edition (FDMEE), Data Relationship Management (DRM), all the way to MySQL; each fulfills a useful niche in the new world…but it’s helpful to know where we’ve come from, what we have now, and where we’re going.
Many organizations have a significant investment in data integration people and technologies they rightly want to leverage but, right now, PBCS has seemingly has few hooks to utilize these capabilities. Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (FDMEE) is baked into the platform but none of the other Oracle tools we’ve come to know and love are there. We have customers asking if this is the end for them.
There’s always that sunk cost, economic rabbit-hole discussion we can go down, or we can just consider the big picture again. If we think of information systems like plumbing systems, data comes from over there, it goes round-and-around and comes out here, at the end of that tortured metaphor is your financial plan.
Now it’s a matter of considering where the “round-and-around” will happen and if it will work in your particular situation. But every enterprise is very different, so back to the big picture again for some basic understanding; we still need to get PBCS the right data at the right time. If you already have on-premise data integration (ETL or ELT) tools hooked up to your ERP system or data warehouse, all you have to do is tweak your current data transformations and toss them across the valley to the opening arms of PBCS.
I know, “easier said than done,” but PBCS is no different than the on-premise version of Oracle Hyperion Planning in that regard: in the end they both need transformed data and metadata. So on this side of the valley, you’ve already got ODI and DRM and all the other nice tools in place to transform your data. Good, keep using them! EPM Automate is a great tool to pick up files and get it over to PBCS, and FDMEE on the cloud is a very capable tool in its own right to further transform data, if necessary.
Synchronization, timing and frequency, o-demand requirements, etc., are all going to come into play and you’ll need to consider what your community’s tolerance-level may be for having more or less of those, or whether it’s really worth having them at all. When considering going to the cloud it may also be a good time for a thorough spring cleaning of your data integration processes.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of where the majority of your data transformation and integration will be done: on-premise or in the cloud. If you have demanding requirements, on-premise is probably still the way to go. I have no inside information to share but if I had to guess, Oracle’s PBCS product roadmap likely includes robust cloud data integration options as a pretty high priority in the future.