Brief Facts and Myths of Planning and Budgeting cloud service (PBCS)

Facts

1. Less expensive

• Compared to the on premise Hyperion Planning system setup, cloud setup is much cheaper as there are very few costs involved.
• Some of the costs that are not required for cloud service are as follows:
• No hardware costs as the cloud system will be maintained by service provider (like servers, switches, DR environment etc.)
• No software (OS & other tools) costs in order to manage the planning servers as the service provider will take care of the same
• Obviously no maintenance costs for both hardware and software
• No costs related to maintenance of any third-party tools for the setup
• There is no cost involved to maintain personnel (like DBAs, System Admins etc.) to support databases, software etc.

• Comparatively, setting up of an application in PBCS is far less than the on premise setup
• Once the PBCS is enabled and a blue print is designed, it is ready to be implemented right away and hence time-to-market is very less
• Packaged functionality available out of the box and hence short time to implement
• Very few errors as the functionality is mostly tested and packaged thereby reducing implementation timeline

• No upgrades to the Hyperion tools as the cloud releases take care of upgrades automatically
• No patches to servers or operating systems as they are managed completely by the cloud service provider
• All new functionality will be available without additional development efforts which will be an added value
• A specific schedule for maintenance is followed as per the service provider and no additional down time is needed

• No additional maintenance is required as the cloud service provider will take care of all the maintenance work other than application maintenance.
• No worries about compatibility issues unless the client side changes without proper testing
  

Myths

1. Everything can be automated in cloud and hence no support is needed

• It is popular myth that everything can be automated and therefore no support is required for PBCS. This is not true. First of all, Cloud service provider will not perform any activities related to application as that falls under customer's responsibility. Hence, there is application maintenance that has to be performed even in PBCS world
• Some of the changes like description changes, member name changes, alternate hierarchy changes etc. which are quite common in business world have to be managed by application team

• This is also one of popular myth that is lying around. Although there are certain occasions where certain programs caused disruption in data, but in general the communication protocol used i.e., https is very safe and is not easily broken
• Any sensitive data transfer can be transferred using secure FTP protocol along with SSH
• A normal FTP can be used where data sensitivity is not critical

• This myth is something that most people think but it is not always cheaper with cloud. For example, take a scenario where multiple planning applications are designed one for each department and then all the departmental data rolls up to Corporate Planning and Analysis. In this situation creating multiple applications i.e., more than three will not be a feasible solution using one instance of PBCS. If you use multiple instances then it might mean an expensive option
• Similarly, in a case where there are certain business processes done outside of Hyperion planning and an interface has to be built between the two which may lead to expensive solution

• This is a myth where people think everything can be done using cloud version. But not all functionality that is available in on premise system is not available yet on cloud version. This myth may become fact once the cloud service catches up to on premise on the functionality