EPM Cloud: Oracle PCMCS vs. Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management

Cloud applications are typically more flexible, accessible, cost-effective, and collaborative than their on-premises counterparts; All of these traits are essential for an effective financial planning & analysis platform. A growing number of organizations are moving their FP&A applications into the cloud, but for a variety of reasons, some have yet to cross over.

If you’re deciding between migrating to the cloud and remaining on-premises, it can be difficult to get an overview of all your options. This blog post will explore the difference between Oracle’s on-premises and cloud offerings for profitability and cost management, so that you can make the choice that’s best-suited to your unique business situation.

What is Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management?

Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (PCM) is an Oracle software tool for analyzing the profitability and costs of your business. The software sits on top of Oracle Essbase, leveraging Essbase’s robust feature set to perform complex multidimensional analysis of your data and return the insights you need.

What is Oracle PCMCS?

Oracle Profitability and Cost Management Cloud Service (PCMCS) is the cloud-based equivalent of Hyperion PCM. It gives users the ability to combine financial and operational information from across the enterprise, with robust data management capabilities that fit the needs of today’s complex business environments.

Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management vs. Oracle PCMCS

Unsurprisingly, Cloud EPM products that have been on the market longer compare more favorably against their on-premises counterparts. (E)PBCS, which has been on the market much longer than FCCS, has surpassed the functionality of on-premises Hyperion Planning in many respects. As a testament to the FCCS product management and development teams, FCCS is nearing parity with HFM.

With PCMCS, Oracle has achieved feature parity with the core functionality of on-premises PCM and has added features to the cloud version not available in on-premises; for example:

• Dashboarding: As with the other Cloud EPM applications, PCMCS includes robust dashboarding capabilities.
• MDX formulas: Oracle PCMCS also supports queries using the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) syntax, the data manipulation language for Essbase.

Final Thoughts

On-premises PCM customers should strongly consider moving to PCMCS, given the maturity and feature set of the cloud offering. Get rid of the time and cost associated with managing hardware, applying patches and performing periodic upgrades, all without sacrificing on features.