The Value Index is the result
of more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers and their products
and how well they satisfy specific business and IT needs. The methodology used
to produce the Value Index evaluates in detail aspects of product functionality
and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the
buying process and customer assurance. The Index represents the value a
vendor's offers and relevant aspects of its products and services, using both a
clear and accessible graphical and analytical representation in thermometer
form and a precise numerical index.
Oracle continues to enrich
the capabilities of its Hyperion suite of applications that support the finance
function, if that will be enough to sustain its market share and new generation
of expectations. At the recent Oracle Open World these new features were
on display, and spokespeople described how the company will be transitioning
its software to cloud deployment. Hyperion
can eliminate many manual steps and speed execution of routine work. It also
can enhance accuracy, ensure tasks are completed on a timely basis, foster
coordination between Finance and the rest of the organization and generate
insights into corporate performance. For this, the software gets high marks.
Oracle understands that it must address changing user experience requirements
as the baby boomers retire and are replaced by people who have fundamentally
different expectations of how software is supposed to work. While there was
plenty of evidence at an Open World that Oracle is taking steps to remedy this
at a corporate level, it’s up to individual units to implement changes to their
software portfolio, and it’s not clear that this is a priority for the Hyperion
group. But in other areas, Oracle is busy addressing gaps in its FPM offerings.
To address the growing
popularity of its cloud-based rivals, Oracle’s long-awaited Planning and
Budgeting Cloud Service should be available by the end of 2013, providing
budgeting, planning, collaborative forecasting and reporting as services to
companies. It
is adding mobile enablement to Hyperion Financial Management and Planning, starting
with an executive approval application to ensure that necessary signoffs can
occur anywhere to speed the completion of routine work.
Hyperion offers a rich set of
capabilities to automate the extended close cycle – all of the activities that
start with the reclosing functions and continue through completion of external
reporting. Oracle’s
Financial Close Suite of applications is designed to enable companies to
execute their period-end close faster and more accurately while requiring fewer
resources. This is important because managing their close well is an issue for
more than half of companies. Our research found that 61 percent of corporations
take more than six business days to complete their quarterly or semiannual
close (the consensus best practice is closing within six business days). Rather
than achieving a faster close, which 83 percent of companies said is important
or very important; the research found that on average it takes a day longer for
companies to close than it took them five years earlier. In conjunction with
better process design, using software to automate manual processes, manage all
phases of process execution and limit the use of desktop spreadsheets is an
effective way to shorten a company’s close cycle.
Oracle
Hyperion’s Financial Close Suite is Tax Provision. Accurately calculating and
reporting direct (income) taxes is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process
for almost all midsize and larger companies. There are two necessary IT
elements to managing this process. One is ensuring that all of the data needed
for provisioning and any subsequent audit is readily available. An option here
is a tax data warehouse for companies that have a large number of legal
entities and/or operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Hyperion doesn’t have
this capability. However, for companies that have less complex requirements or
just want to simplify and centralize the gathering of tax data, it provides the
second necessary element: an environment that manages tax data collection,
improves the accuracy of the data and the calculations (by substantially
reducing the need for desktop spreadsheets and rekeying of data from source
systems) and automates data movement through configurable wizards.
Oracle has added important
new capabilities to its FPM suite since acquiring Hyperion. Expanding the suite has helped the
company sustain its franchise in the face of determined competition from large
to smaller sized software vendors such as IBM, Infor and SAP, as well as smaller ones including Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, Host Analytics, Longview and Tagetik . The generational
change that’s under way in corporations poses a serious competitive threat to
Oracle. For finance professionals, word of mouth and brand loyalty count far
more than “enchanted boxes” or “undulations”: That’s how Hyperion came to
dominate the market.
Credits: BASED ON THE FINANCIAL
MANAGEMEND VALUE INDEX- Oracle Hyperion
