Oracle has announced key integration milestones and enhancements for its Enterprise Performance Management System, which is designed to support critical management processes, including setting goals, formulating plans, monitoring performance, analyzing variances and exceptions, reporting to stakeholders, aligning and adjusting actuals with plans.
Oracle's integration of Hyperion marks a key milestone in its roadmap to provide a comprehensive EPM System that unifies transaction, business intelligence (BI) and financial performance management solutions. The company's EPM System includes a unified enterprise semantic layer and metadata, common infrastructure services, and a common Workspace. Oracle's integrated EPM System spans its complementary offerings, including a complete BI foundation, leading financial management applications and comprehensive operational business intelligence applications. The system enables CFOs, line of business managers and IT executives to gain insight, make better decisions and drive business performance improvement.
In direct response to customer feedback, Oracle rapidly integrated and certified its comprehensive portfolio of BI, financial management and business intelligence applications offerings while continuing to deliver new product enhancements. In the three months immediately following the Hyperion acquisition, Oracle aligned infrastructure support to Oracle standards for components such as web browsers, operating systems and processors; aligned license keys to Oracle practices; certified all applications with Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3; and re-branded user interfaces and documentation. Oracle also enabled easy deployment of Hyperion products in Oracle environments by adding support for Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Identity Manager. Additionally, Oracle implemented standard Oracle Lifetime support policies for the Hyperion products - to protect customers' existing investments.
Recent product enhancements reflected in Oracle's EPM portfolio include:
- Financial Performance Management Applications: New capabilities include drill-through leveraging Financial Data Quality Management, and enhancements to inter-company transactions and process management in Oracle's Hyperion Financial Management Module. The new features will help accelerate faster close processes and improved analytics. Enhancements to the new Enterprise Performance Management Architect module enable a single point of administration and lower cost of ownership.
- Operational BI Applications: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are packaged solutions that leverage Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) and feature pre-built application content covering all functional areas of the enterprise, including: human resources, financials, procurement, supply chain, order management, service, and sales and marketing as well as vertical industries. Recent enhancements include added support for data warehouse developers and ETL administrators, increased localization to 16 languages and expanded integration with the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle's Siebel CRM, and third-party applications including SAP R/3.
- Hot-Pluggable BI Foundation: Oracle's BI foundation features Hyperion Essbase and Oracle BI Suite EE Plus, Oracle's comprehensive, standards-based suite of BI infrastructure and tools software. The latest release of Hyperion Essbase features time series enhancements as well as a new trickle-feed capability enabling near real-time analytic applications. Essbase's new flexible dimensions and dynamic time series analysis capabilities enable greater support of industries such as retail, consumer packaged goods, and others. Oracle BI Suite EE Plus was recently enhanced with customer-driven capabilities for improved collaboration, search, and information delivery. These include Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher integration and Microsoft Office integration enabling interactive support for PowerPoint. In addition, capabilities from the Hyperion acquisition augment Oracle BI Suite EE Plus with more options for BI deployment information delivery, financial reporting, and access to multidimensional sources.
