by Alex C Leung, CPA, CA | August 13, 2013
Reducing enterprise cost is #3 on the Top 10 CIO Business Priorities of 2013 [Gartner Research].
In today’s business climate, organizations are constantly challenged to “do more with less”. For IT, the opportunity lies in infrastructure and operating costs which represent 60% of the typical enterprise IT budget.
How do you lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Hyperion without impacting value and service to the business?
In this article, we take a closer look at license, infrastructure, support, and maintenance opportunities which can represent up to 62% of the TCO.
Tip #1: Migrate non-production environments onto an On-Demand environment
According to The Financial Post, most IT infrastructures operate at less than 15% capacity due to uneven demand and decentralized purchasing.
Cloud based environments offer utility-based pricing and the flexibility to scale up, in or out on-demand which means that you always have the right amount of compute resources when you need them and have better control of costs / better capacity utilization.
82% of companies surveyed saved money in their last cloud adoption project (per CSC Cloud Usage Index)
Unlike cloud based environments, the cost of maintaining on-premise environments are set regardless of whether they are active (e.g., monitoring, back-up, patching, rack space, infrastructure refresh, etc.)
While options for Hyperion On Demand environments are limited, the industry is heading in this direction (e.g., Hyperion Planning SaaS from Oracle may be available by the end of 2013, Oracle continues to invest in capabilities to migrate between on premise and cloud based environments, etc.).
Interested in finding out more? Please email epm-nimbus@goalgetters.com.
Tip #2: Consider “Smart Sourcing” Hyperion support
Finding and retaining people with sufficient product knowledge to provide Hyperion functional and technical support are a scarce commodity. Maintaining in-house competencies may be an expensive proposition:
- You may need to hire a team since it is rare for people that have depth in more than one Hyperion product (e.g., Hyperion Strategic Finance, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Data Quality Management, Data Relationship Management, etc.)
- There may not be enough work to hire dedicated resources for Hyperion support but you can’t hire half a person.
- Supporting Hyperion on a part-time basis may result in missed opportunities to add value to the business.
One cost effective option would be to engage an authorized Oracle Partner who explicitly offers Hyperion Managed Services. However, be wary of firms that are simply looking to keep their consultants busy in between projects and think twice about those that heavily rely upon offshore resources. In a recent article by InfoWorld, onshore workers were found to outperform offshore staff.
Tip #3: Assess the merits of an upgrade
Keeping your Oracle | Hyperion EPM platform in line with your organization’s technical standards can save a lot of headaches and cost in the long run (i.e., supporting software / versions that vendors no longer support, maintaining multiple web browser & operating system versions, etc.). Did you know that …
Premier Support for Oracle Hyperion EPM v11.1.1.X has expired (Click here for details)
Fixes available in the upgrade may address “band-aid” solutions created (e.g., data form can now display more than 1024 rows and 256 columns, performance, etc.) .
New functionality may also minimize the need for new software or opportunity to sunset software (e.g., predictive planning capabilities with Hyperion Planning, plan types with an ASO database, mobile access to Financial Reports, replacing HAL with FDM EE etc.)
Oracle Hyperion EPM v11.1.2.3 was released April 2013 (Click here for details)
Tip #4: Periodically review and rationalize Hyperion software licenses
As the business changes, requirements evolve. You may own more Hyperion licenses or products than you really need:
- Licenses acquired through business acquisitions.
- Changes in licensing structures Business divesture or “carve outs”
- Unused products or users seats.
While Hyperion software licensing can be complex, there are often real cost savings to periodically reviewing the needs of the business against software licenses purchased and maintained.
Hyperion comes with certain tools and reports that can make this exercise easier. Please email support@goalgetters.com for details.
