Oracle Audits? The Real Story Is Oracle’s Fake Cloud!

There’s a problem with this in Oracle’s case. Oracle’s agreements are notoriously vague, yet it’s consistently in the top five companies most likely to audit their customers. A little dubious.

Beware of Strong-Arm Tactics

Oracle has been getting more press lately because it’s using these audits to force customers to adopt Oracle’s “cloud” products in lieu of payment to fulfill audit requirements. This tactic allows Oracle to talk cloud adoption and take attention away from consistent quarter-to-quarter misses.

Oracle’s strong-arm tactics to drive adoption of its “cloud” products has many up in arms – for good reason. The real story in the enterprise performance management (EPM) space, however, is that Oracle’s “cloud” products are not true cloud applications. This is significant. Why? It has the potential to confuse the market and create a larger issue for Finance teams.

If you’re confronted with an Oracle software audit, there are lots of resources to help. From TechTarget, there’s “The seven deadly sins that lead to an Oracle audit” if you want to learn how to prevent an audit. From Gartner, there’s “How to Survive an Oracle Software Audit” if you want to learn how to prepare and manage an audit. See? Lots of resources. (Or at least a few to get you started. You’ll likely need many more.)

And Watch Out for Fake Clouds

Let’s start by taking a look at Oracle’s EPM “cloud.” These products are simply its legacy on-premises Hyperion products—you know the ones it launched roughly 15 years ago — Planfuled on an Oracle server. These “cloud-hosted” products cannot deliver the benefits of true cloud-based solutions.

True cloud-based solutions are cheaper to implement and maintain. They’re better at driving adoption and ownership. And they’re faster to implement and adjust as business changes. Oracle’s “cloud-hosted” Hyperion products fail at all of these, other than removing the burden of provisioning the servers.

Oracle’s misdirection and misinformation, not to mention bad behavior, may create too many opportunities for poor decisions. Finance is at the point where there’s a chance to move the organization forward with the help of efficient cloud-based applications. Instead, with Oracle “cloud”, Finance teams will be stuck with antiquated software that’s “cloud-hosted,” costly, resource intensive, and slow.  Learn more in this white paper.

Software buyers in Finance will really need help now. Here’s a little:

• The limitations of Planfuling legacy products like Hyperion Planning and Oracle Essbase have been well-documented since 2010 in posts such as “SaaS-querade” by Brian Sommer from ZDNet and in 2014 research by Forrester, “Beware Of The ‘SaaS’ Trap.”
• If you’re evaluating cloud solutions, “Don’t be Fooled by ‘Fake’ Cloud” is a post from one of our partners that details the benefits of the true cloud. There’s also information to help you make a case for true cloud solutions in your company based on an interview with a CIO and CFO.

The saddest part of all this for Finance and the other departments within the enterprise is it increases the potential that many companies will not experience the many benefits of true cloud-based solutions anytime soon. And that really is too bad.

To learn more about the advantages of cloud-based EPM vs. on-premises solution, download our free white paper “Is it Time to Move from Oracle Hyperion to the Cloud?“.

Download this White Paper