One of the hottest topics at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 this week is “the cloud”.  Over the past few years, Oracle has made major investments in cloud-based applications, including some acquisitions, and now has over 100 applications available through Oracle Cloud services. 

At OpenWorld this week, Oracle announced seven new offerings delivered via the Oracle Cloud services platform, one of which is the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service.  Based on Oracle Hyperion Planning, this service is the first of Oracle’s EPM applications to be to be offered in the Cloud.    This solution is targeted to organizations that are struggling with spreadsheets or legacy planning and budgeting applications, want to deploy a world class solution for financial planning and budgeting, but are constrained by IT resources and capital budgets. With the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, organizations can fast track their way to world-class financial planning, budgeting and forecasting – at cloud speed, with no IT infrastructure investments and with minimal IT resources.

Oracle Hyperion Planning is a market-leading budgeting, planning and forecasting application that is used by over 3,300 organizations worldwide.  Prior to this announcement, Oracle Hyperion Planning was only offered on a license and maintenance basis.  It could be deployed on-premise, or hosted through Oracle On-Demand or third party hosting partners.  With this announcement, Oracle’s market-leading Hyperion Planning application will be available as a Cloud Service and through subscription-based pricing. This lowers the cost of entry and deployment for new customers and provides a scalable environment to support future growth.

With this announcement, Oracle is the first major vendor to offer one of its core EPM applications as a cloud-based service.  Other major vendors have recently announced cloud-based EPM solutions, but these are only BI dashboards delivered via a cloud platform.   With this announcement Oracle is providing a market-leading, world-class financial budgeting, planning and forecasting as a cloud service, with the following advantages:

·                     Subscription-based pricing

·                     Available standalone or as an extension to Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud Service

·                     Implementation services available from Oracle and the Oracle Partner Network

·                     High scalability and performance

·                     Integrated financial reporting and MS Office interface

·                     Seamless integration with Oracle and non-Oracle transactional applications

·                     Provides customers with more options for their planning and budgeting deployment vs. strictly on-premise or cloud-only solution providers.

The OpenWorld announcement of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is a preview announcement, with controlled availability expected in calendar year 2012.  For more information, check out the links below:

Press Release

Web site

If you have any questions or need additional information, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].