Is a Hybrid Oracle EPM Cloud Strategy Right for You?

These days, Oracle is undoubtedly a cloud-first company: new features and functionality are rolled out to the cloud before they reach their on-premises equivalent. Yet for various reasons—whether it be simplicity, data security, or just organizational inertia—many Oracle customers still maintain one or more of their enterprise performance management (EPM) applications on-premises.

In this case, a hybrid Oracle EPM cloud strategy, keeping some Oracle EPM applications on-premises while moving others to the cloud, could be the perfect fit for your organization. The benefits of a hybrid Oracle cloud strategy include:

• Cutting IT costs for some or all applications by switching to an operational expense (OPEX) rather than a capital expenditures (CAPEX) expense model.
• Lowering business risk by taking advantage of cloud data backups and business continuity features.
• Organizational stability by maintaining business-critical applications on-premises until the time is right for a cloud migration.

 
So, given the competing benefits of cloud and on-premises, why not try to straddle the divide by choosing a hybrid Oracle cloud strategy? One of Datavail’s recent clients, a global industrial safety company operating in 20 countries around the world, was faced with exactly this question when they needed to upgrade their Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.3 deployment.

With the end of support (EOS) date for 11.1.x arriving soon in December 2021, the client knew they had to upgrade to 11.2 to remain in compliance and enjoy new features and bug fixes. However, whether the client should perform an Oracle EPM migration to the cloud or stay on-premises was still an open question:

• Oracle has guaranteed that it will continue to offer support for Hyperion EPM 11.2 on-premises through at least 2030, making this a safe long-term option for another decade.
• However, the client had already completed a cloud migration to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) and could realize greater efficiencies by moving EPM to the Oracle cloud as well.

 
Ultimately, the right advice for most companies will be to move multiple Oracle applications to the cloud—especially since purchasing EPM Cloud gives you access to all of them at once. However, you might also wish to stagger your migration projects, moving some of them before others as a trial run.

Thinking about a hybrid Oracle EPM cloud strategy for yourself? Find out how it worked for one of our clients by reading our case study: Industrial Safety Company Stops Outages by Moving to Oracle EPM Cloud.