Tuesday 18 June 2019

Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.2 Announcement

Tomorrow is the 2nd day of the UKOUG Applications Unlimited 2019 event, where there is a session scheduled to discuss the Oracle Hyperion EPM roadmap, including details of 11.2

It appears in anticipation of this Oracle has released the following document:

https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/support/hyperion-epm-announcement.pdf

The title of the document is "Announcing Continuous Innovation on Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System 11.2".

Most of the information in the document isn't new to people who have been keeping up to date with the snippets of information Oracle have been releasing thus far. Essentially EPM 11.2 will be kept "evergreen" with technology and feature updates through PSUs - no more maintenance releases.

It features this nice graphic:


To summarise I will paste from the PDF:

"Ongoing Applications Updates—ongoing updates to Oracle Hyperion EPM System 11.2 applications code, analogous to the 11.1.2.4.x updates we have made available on an approximate annually basis. Updates will be cumulative and will combine bug fixes and new features into a consolidated patch set that can be easily applied with O-Patch."

"Ongoing Technology Stack Updates—ongoing updates to allow for the needed refresh of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform technologies underlying the Oracle Hyperion EPM System. These will allow customers to obtain new versions of the technology stack without upgrading the Oracle Hyperion EPM System applications code."

It also mentions the support policy for 11.2, this is described in another document:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/applications-unlimited-1970561.pdf

Essentially, Oracle will not stop Premier Support on 11.2 before 2030 and will make a decision every year on whether or not to extend Premier Support for another year after that. So if Oracle decides every year for the next 5 years to extend the support then you would have Premier Support until 2035.

If you are wondering what Premier Support actually means: there are 3 support levels - Premier, Extended and Sustaining Support. The differences can be described in the table below:



Premier Support
Extended Support
Sustaining Support
Major Product and Technology ReleasesYESYESYES
24x7 assistance with service requestsYESYESYES
Access to My Oracle Support including Knowledge BaseYESYESYES
Software and Operating System UpdatesYESYESPRE-EXISTING
Security AlertsYESYESPRE-EXISTING
Critical Patch UpdatesYESYESPRE-EXISTING
Tax, Legal, and Regulatory UpdatesYESYESPRE-EXISTING
Upgrade Tools/ScriptsYESYESPRE-EXISTING
Access to Platinum ServicesYESYESNO
Certification with most existing Oracle products/versionsYESYESNO
Certification with most existing third-party products/versionsYESYESNO
Certification with most new third-party products/versionsYESNONO

I will add more details to this post as we get more information over the coming days.

Edit: a bit late to the party but - here we go!

The big thing everyone wanted to know was "when is 11.2 going to be released?" The answer Oracle has given us is September 2019. If that isn't much comfort given previous deadlines they also said that the release will be done by Oracle Openworld at the very least (15 Sep 2019 to 19 Sep 2019). I think that makes sense, they want everything ready for their big announcements at Openworld.

Something they have mentioned is that basically 11.2 is 11.1.2.4 on Fusion Middleware 12g. This should make it a bit easier to upgrade - with a caveat that no in-place upgrade is supported from 11.1.2.4 to 11.2 - and should make folks happy they won't have to completely rewrite their tools to integrate with 11.2 (a sigh of relief from the developers of EPM Maestro and Accelatis, I'm sure!). Something they did mention is that there is around 50 to 100 exclusive bug fixes for 11.2, mostly related to things that cannot be fixed on the current platform. For instance support for TLS 1.2 is not possible with EPM 11.1.2.4 - see John G's excellent blog post https://john-goodwin.blogspot.com/2019/03/hybrid-fdmee-and-upcoming-oracle-cloud.html.

Something that (luckily) won't affect us but definitely will affect other customers is that EPMA is now officially being killed off. I seem to remember that rumours of EPMA's demise were dismissed as "fake news" 2 years ago - unfortunately I can't seem to find the slide but I'm sure I heard it! In any case it is being replaced with a license-restricted version of DRM - similar to how FDMEE includes a license-restricted version of ODI.

Some other fatalities include Workforce Planning, Strategic Finance, Essbase Analytics Link and the Simplified User Interface for Planning. Basically Oracle's reasoning was to kill off features too few customers actually use. I'm sure the death of EAL will be mourned by everyone except for the people who actually had to use it :)

Most of the other announcements had been heard before. Reporting and Analysis is no more (I won't be shedding a tear for that one), new features and certifications will be released in PSUs and now Essbase is a separate produce from EPM - so it seems that Essbase will stay on the 11.1.2.4 version for the time being.