Intelligent Enterprise

Oracle made big news today introducing the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Fusion Edition (Oracle EPM). The release marks both the final integration of Hyperion and Oracle technologies following last year's acquisition as well as a bold statement as to the future direction of enterprise performance management as a kind of ERP system for corporate management.

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."

Oracle EPM is said to provide a single, consistent platform to enable all management processes from operational and financial planning to consolidation – familiar performance management terrain -- as well as the many management steps in between. For example, a new Profitability and Cost Management Application helps business measure different lines of business and parts of the organization from a profit-and-loss perspective. And a new Integrated Operational Planning module within Oracle Hyperion Financial Management brings together operating plans withing the the functional lines of business with the financial plans and budgets set by finance so users can see the "ripple effect" of changes in plans as well as results across the supply chain, the demand chain and financial outcomes. This lets managers anticipate as well as react to changing market conditions.

A key aspect of new Oracle EPM capabilities stems from tight integration with ERP systems. For instance, you can now drill through from EPM applications directly into the Oracle E-Business Suite to draw accurate data from transaction systems. The company promised similar integration with PeopleSoft as well as with SAP ERP software, though it did not specify dates for future integrations.

New capabilities within Oracle EPM include a common Calculations Manager that lets business users create, validate and then reuse business rules, calculations, definitions and planning and consolidation applications across the enterprise. Similarly, the suite includes a common Web workspace, Microsoft Office interface, and application administrative environment

Any doubts about the future of Hyperion Essbase were laid to rest as Oracle announced server enhancements as well as a new Wizard-driven design environment. In addition, Oracle BI Enterprise Edition and Essbase have been integrated so that Essbase can be a source to the BI server and vice versa, with both environments now supporting different styles of analysis including relational, multidimentional (OLAP), and combined relational and OLAP (ROLAP).

The product is dubbed "Fusion Edition" because it's built on and takes advantage of underlying Oracle middleware including services-oriented architecture, identity management, BPEL workflow, Enteprise (systems) manager, and Oracle Data Integrator for data integration and ETL.

I share more on the announcements in this deeper news story, but suffice it to say that Oracle is delivering an extensively integrated suite and it's clearly playing two important cards. First, Oracle beat SAP and IBM to the punch in acquiring a major BI/performance management vendor last April (while SAP and IBM didn't complete their deals until early this year), so it's naturally beating SAP in the race to integrate existing and acquired technologies. Second, as one of two vendors dominating the ERP market, Oracle is emphasizing integration with business applications, differentiating its offerings with those of IBM-Cognos and the remaining independents.