Oracle is a global provider of enterprise cloud computing, offering software, platform, infrastructure and data as a service. The company employs more than 160,000 people worldwide and serves 430,000 customers in 175 countries.
Oracle’s portfolio includes a comprehensive stack of cloud applications, platform services and engineered systems. The vendor’s cloud enterprise performance management (EPM) and analytics portfolios contain a set of strategic offerings, which are packaged as Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM and Oracle Analytics Cloud. However, the company’s widely used on-premises solutions (e.g., Oracle Hyperion EPM) continue to be enhanced and fully supported. A variety of other cloud and on-premises offerings and applications round out Oracle’s broad product portfolio.
The EPM portfolio includes various products and applications covering all relevant EPM processes (e.g., planning, budgeting and forecasting, profitability and cost management, financial consolidation and close, account reconciliation, financial and management reporting, tax provision and reporting, transfer pricing, ESG/sustainability reporting, analytics and enterprise data management). Oracle Cloud EPM is a cloud-native SaaS solution, delivered end-to-end from data centers around the world, owned and operated by Oracle itself. All Oracle Cloud EPM solutions are based on a consistent technical platform architecture, run on Oracle database technology and can be deployed in a modular fashion according to customer needs and priority. For data integration from data sources, Oracle Cloud EPM provides native, wizard-based features including predefined connectors and prebuilt adapters to Oracle and non-Oracle operational systems (e.g., ERPs). For customers who prefer to manage EPM applications on premises, the Hyperion EPM portfolio is still available (i.e., Oracle Hyperion Planning for planning, budgeting and forecasting and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management for financial consolidation and close). Oracle Cloud EPM has some ‘shared DNA’ with the on-premises Oracle Hyperion EPM portfolio. For example, it leverages the optional Microsoft Office add-in Oracle Smart View to work in Excel, Word and PowerPoint across both cloud and on-premises versions.
In terms of planning, Oracle Cloud EPM offers a broad range of capabilities for enterprise-wide integrated business planning processes – including connected operational, financial and strategic planning, budgeting and forecasting, as well as scenario simulations. Prebuilt modules and solutions expand the reach of Oracle’s planning solution beyond finance into sales, workforce, IT, marketing and supply chain operations. To support users with tasks such as predictions, simulations, correlations and to automatically find insights and take actions, Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) is a major area of continued investment for Oracle. Several statistical and ML features are embedded in Oracle Cloud EPM including support for integrating third-party ML models and ML engines. In addition, Oracle’s own data science platforms and ML algorithms embedded in Oracle databases can be leveraged.
Oracle’s flagship product for analytics, Oracle Analytics Cloud, incorporates capabilities for the complete analytics cycle including data preparation and machine learning. It offers modules for developing and deploying formatted reports, interactive dashboards and analytics suitable for business users. Data visualizations from Oracle Analytics Cloud can now be displayed on EPM dashboards. Oracle Analytics Server, the on-premises version of Oracle Analytics Cloud, brings all the capabilities of the cloud platform to organizations requiring on-premises deployment options. In addition, Oracle Fusion Analytics offers embedded analytics within the vendor’s portfolio of business applications. With its EPM suite, Oracle has adopted the strategy of embedding the analytics and reporting capabilities needed by the majority of customers and their users into the Cloud EPM platform as opposed to requiring customers to separately license Oracle Analytics Cloud.