Revolutionary
Oracle Hyperion support

Oracle Hyperion overview

Oracle Hyperion provides enterprise performance management (EPM), intended to improve business predictability.

It does so by integrating an organisation’s budgeting and forecasting with its planning processes – such as financial and operational. Oracle Hyperion can also refer to Oracle Hyperion Financial Management. This software assists with financial reporting, meeting global regulatory requirements, and therefore an organisation’s compliance.

Oracle Hyperion was also a strategic, competitive move to expand the vendor’s software to SAP customers. Oracle already had PeopleSoft HR, Siebel CRM, G-Log, Demantra, i-flex, Oracle Retail, and Oracle Fusion Middleware installed at SAP’s largest ERP customers. Oracle President Charles Phillips said, “Oracle Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP’s most important customers view and analyse their underlying SAP ERP data.”

The history of Hyperion

Oracle Hyperion is the culmination of 20 years of development, mergers, and one significant purchase.

It originally started out as IMRS in 1989, dedicated to financial and management consolidation software. In 1991, Hyperion was launched, which was so successful, the organisation changed its name to Hyperion Software Corporation in 1995. Between then and 2007, Hyperion Software Corporation underwent several different mergers, growing its enterprise. Then, Oracle announced it would purchase Hyperion, as an additional division of the larger organisation.

The common problems with Hyperion

The most commonly deployed version of Hyperion is 11.1.2.4. It was originally released in 2015 and is due to go out of Premier Support by the end of 2021 (although this deadline has been extended in the past). 11.2 was released in 2019, but there has been some confusion over how much of an ‘upgrade’ this new version really is, since certain modules are still on 11.1.2.4. There is a Cloud version which seems to be where most of Oracle’s attention and resources are going, but there’s no real upgrade path between any of these versions; it’s always a migration requiring a separate installation and then moving the applications to the new version and adjusting any custom code.

So, the most common problem Hyperion customers seem to be facing is the fact that on-premise versions aren’t getting the attention compared to the Cloud versions and the current version is seen as perhaps unfinished.

This uncertainty means customers face a somewhat complicated upgrade to the currently supported on-premise version which might be considered a migration considering the caveats, or whether its better to just migrate to the Cloud right now, even if that’ll force more of a change and potentially be costly later.

Luckily, customers have a third option, allowing them to stay supported on the version they want to use, reducing business disruption and costs, and improving the level of service…