FAQ

For customers with existing Hyperion Planning applications, the migration path from Hyperion Planning to PBCS is very easy. If a customer is on 11.1.2.3.500 or greater, it is a three-click process: (1) use Lifecycle Management and export the application definition, (2) upload through the automation utility in PBCS, and (3) import it on the PBCS side. Earlier versions may require minor modifications to the XML files for the LCM packet, but we have yet to see a migration that takes more than a few hours.

There are also many part of your on-premises Hyperion Planning application that won’t migrate and many files you’ll need to adjust.

LCM migrations from an on-premises application to PBCS are seamless transitions. However, migrating from cloud to on-prem is not so simple. Many file formats have changed in the cloud, so going from the cloud to on-prem requires a lot of file adjustments.  Since we at US-Analytics have been developing on both PBCS and on-premises Planning, our consultants know the ins and outs of migrating between the different server sets. 

PBCS is now a couple years ahead of on-prem Planning in certain areas — some of which are major. The two applications have a complete different user interface. Hyperion Planning still uses Workspace, while all pods in the cloud no longer have Workspace. The simplified interface is all that’s available on PBCS, which has significant advantages. If you want to learn about the differences between Workspace and the simplified interface, we covered it in this webinar — PBCS vs. Hyperion Planning: Using the Simplified Interface.

From an administrative perspective, the cloud environment is significantly easier to administer because you don’t have to manage things like server-to-server point communications, logs and tuning, etc.

There is no limit to the number of custom dimensions. As with on-premises Hyperion Planning, PBCS allows you to create multiple plan types with their own custom dimensionality as necessary.

Yes, it supports up to seven total plan types: 3 BSO, 3 ASO, and 1 consolidated plan type for reporting.

PBCS comes with a full set of data integration tools. For those who are familiar with Oracle FDM or FDMEE, FDMEE is embedded directly within the PBCS application. You can do cloud-based data uploads into PBCS and then do any mapping translations that need to occur to load data into the planning application going forward. The latest release of PBCS includes the EPM Automate Utility, a scheduling utility that can help support that process.

Additionally, on-prem FDMEE starting in 11.1.2.4.200 supports cloud as a target.

There are multiple approaches to loading dimensions. PBCS allows direct dimension maintenance inside of Smart View; if you have hierarchy definitions that live in an Excel file, you can import them directly through Smart View or apply them. Another way is to load the .csv file directly into the planning user interface. As a third option, you can use the EPM Automate Utility to upload the dimension build files and then kick off any dimension structure changes that need to happen.

You could use “Data Management” in PBCS or, you could use FDMEE on-prem. There are also new features to Data Management to connect directly to Fusion GL, if that happens to be your ERP.

Yes. Just like any on-premises Planning application, PBCS can use Financial Reporting Studio and Smart View, enabling you to perform both ad-hoc retrieves as well as perform Financial Reporting for those who want a better visual display of the data.

Yes, this is a common scenario. Users with read-only access have full capability to do ad-hoc reporting.

Supported web browsers include Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

PBCS security is not synced with MSAD via connection to the MSAD; it is either manually controlled or imported via .csv for the users who are later provisioned for PBCS. Provisioning is also not performed in Shared Services for PBCS. It is controlled in the Oracle Cloud Identity Console. There is also support for Active Directory integration using SAML.

The Vision application, which is the current on-premises application, can be easily deployed into PBCS for testing in a PBCS environment. Vision is also built into PBCS, so you can deploy it to your own PBCS instance after you purchase it, if you want to play with it.

US-Analytics can help your business get started with PBCS using a proven methodology to ensure optimal results. PBCS Pro is an accelerated deployment customized for your organization and delivered in 8–12 weeks, depending on requirements.

Both products are highly recommended by US-Analytics. Schedule a quick call with our planning experts to determine whether Oracle PBCS, Hyperion Planning, or a hybrid solution would best fit your needs as a company.

The Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) makes the functionality of Oracle’s market-leading Hyperion Planning application available to customers in software as a service (SaaS) deployment model. Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is a flexible planning application that’s been optimized for deployment in the Oracle Public Cloud environment. PBCS relies on the infrastructure of Oracle Public Cloud and will therefore follow the release cycle of Oracle Public Cloud. Its functionality mirrors the latest functional feature set of Hyperion Planning on-premises and delivers those features in a Cloud friendly fashion.

The first EPM application to be available in the Cloud is Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service.

All the infrastructure, reporting, and data management components to use Hyperion Planning are included as part of the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. This includes the powerful web based and MS Office based capabilities.

We are planning to bring the additional Planning modules to the Cloud and are evaluating the priority and order in which to do so.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is priced on a per user/per month/per application basis with a minimum of 10 users.

Because Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service eliminates the need for on-premise hardware, and software and also eliminates the need for infrastructure set up, new applications can be deployed in weeks versus months for on-premises applications.

Yes, customers can deploy some of their applications on premises while others are deployed on the Cloud. This allows Lines of Business the flexibility to choose their mode of deployment. It also allows existing customers to upgrade some of their existing Hyperion Planning applications to the Cloud while maintaining the rest on-premises.

Data and metadata can be integrated into Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service using data management capabilities within the PBCS offering. This includes seamless loads of data and metadata and also capabilities to drill back to the source information.

No. Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service can integrate data from Oracle ERP Cloud Services, or on-premises ERP applications.

Yes, this capability is supported using native PBCS capabilities.

The key benefits of the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service are fast time to deployment, reduced up front deployment costs, and the ability to scale up quickly to address future needs. There is no planning software to own or maintain.

Please contact your Oracle sales representative or contact us through cloud.oracle.com.

Each customer chooses a one hour window for daily system maintenance. Upgrades and patches are made automatically during this window. Oracle announces the availability of new service versions in advance.

The first release of PBCS supports upgrade from R11.1.2.1 directly into the Cloud based application. So existing customers can upgrade to this release of their on-premises application and then import their application to PBCS. The immediate roadmap includes supporting R11.1.2.2 and then R11.1.2.3 for import into PBCS.

No.

PBCS has had a successful preview program with many partners and customers who have very positive feedback on the solution. Please contact your sales representative for feedback details.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) is a simple and powerful integration platform in the cloud to maximize the value of your investments in SaaS and on-premises applications. Oracle Integration Cloud Service is Oracle’s integration platform as a service (iPaas) and includes an intuitive web based integration designer for point and click integration between applications, a rich monitoring dashboard that provides real-time insight into the transactions, all of it running on a mature runtime platform on Oracle Cloud. ICS will help customers accelerate their integration projects by pre-integrating with several SaaS Applications and will significantly shorten their time-to-market through a highly intuitive user interface and a large library of SaaS Adapters.

There are no pre-requisites for subscribing to any cloud services while subscribing to Integration Cloud Service.

Integration Cloud Service public trials are coming soon. Please contact your Sales Representative to enroll in a private trial. You can get up-to-speed by viewing the Overview video. Refer to the below links to read more: eBook http://cloud.oracle.com/_downloads/eBook_Integration_File/oracle-integration-cloud-service-ebook.pdf Blogs http://blogs.oracle.com/soa.

See Pricing section for more details.

A Connection identifies a unique Application endpoint that is accessed using Integration Cloud Service. For instance, a sandbox instance of Salesforce.com or your production instance of Oracle Sales Cloud are each considered individual connections. There is a minimum of 6 connections for non-metered ICS and a minimum of 2 connections per month for metered ICS. There is no maximum limit on the # of connections you can place in an order. After you place an order for a specific number of connections, you will be led to a UI wherein you can decide on the allocation of connections to one or more ICS instances. Each ICS instance can accommodate up to 10 connections. For example, if you place an order for 20 connections, you would be able to allocate 10 to one instance and 10 to another instance. If you place an order for 7 connections, you could allocate 5 to one instance and 2 to another. You can process upto a a maximum of one hundred thousand (100,000) messages per connection per day, across all connections. If your ICS instance had 8 connections, you could process upto 800,000 messages per day across all connections. Since once ICS instance can be configured with a max of 10 connections, you can process upto 1 million messages across all connections per day on that instance. Note that the size of the message may not exceed 5 MB.

Integration Cloud Service addresses literally all SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to On-premises integration use-cases including ranging from simple Customer data synchronization across applications, to more advanced integration flows for processing opportunities, quotes, orders etc. The integration patterns range from real-time synchronous message exchanges between 2 applications to publish/subscribe message exchanges between multiple applications. Depending on the application, ICS also enables submission of a batch of requests to process a set of data objects (such as Incidents, Accounts etc) in one single interaction. When operating in a hybrid model, the set of possibilities expand to even larger number of business use-cases.

Integration Cloud Service provides rich and native connectivity to a wide variety of applications including but not limited to Salesforce.com, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud, RightNow, Eloqua, CPQ. This list will grow to a broad portfolio of Oracle and third party SaaS applications over the next few releases. However, you do not need an adapter to get your integrations off the ground. The product does support native Web Services – so any one of the 2300+ SaaS applications in the market today can be integrated with ICS. The same applies to on-premises Applications as well. Native rich adapters for on-premises applications such as E-Business Suite, S.P, Siebel, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft etc will also be available on ICS in future releases.

Though Integration Cloud Service offers a brand new exciting new user experience, under it’s skin, it’s built on the proven and popular Oracle Fusion Middleware platform that 1000s of customers are already running in production running millions of transactions, across all verticals. The adapters that are available on the service are exactly the same adapters that run on our on-premises middleware platform. Moreover, Integration Cloud Service is already hardened by our own internal SaaS Product teams who are delivering integrations on the ICS platform.

Please refer to the Service Level Objective Policy section of the Oracle Cloud Hosting and Delivery Policy available here.

Yes. As long as they are reachable via a SOAP/HTTP endpoint, on-premises applications can be seamlessly and securely integrated using Integration Cloud Service. We will soon release an on-premises Agent component that will enable richer native integration with on-premises applications such as E-Business Suite, SAP, Peoplesoft, JDE, Databases, FTP servers etc. You can also invoke an existing SOA Suite or Service Bus service that runs on your premises to initiate a Business Process or invoke an existing Service in your enterprise.

Yes. However we are working on a plan to deliver the same capability on-premises and in the private cloud.

Yes – you can define tracking identifiers for each integration flow and use them to search and find executed transactions from the monitoring dashboard. The dashboard allows drill-down capabilities and insight into errors. Users can act on these errors by resubmitting or aborting those errors.

If you are looking at a choice of operational simplification, faster time-to-market, and if you have SaaS applications on your near horizon, then Integration Cloud Service, together with an on-premises integration platform operating as a hybrid platform would be a great option.

Yes. The same high-productivity and easy-to-use adapter for Salesforce.com is available with Integration Cloud Service as well.

Very little, compared to an on-premises middleware offering. You no longer have to manage a large IT ecosystem for hosting your dev-test-prod environments. However you will still need to mediate with IT, though to a lesser extent.

Yes. Oracle and its partner SIs can further accelerate your time to market by designing and providing pre-built solutions on the Integration Cloud Service Platform.

During initial product releases it would require a planned down-time once every month for a short duration. The patching window would be announced in advance for your information. We are looking to alleviate this in a future release.

In general, you do not need to undergo training to design integrations using Integration Cloud Service. This is by virtue of the highly simplified user interface that ICS provides. As long as you understand the data models of the applications you are trying to integrate, and understand the basic concepts of integration, that should suffice. The product user interface also embeds various simple instructional videos that can help you figure out how to perform a specific action using ICS console.

For someone who is looking to master the service and offering in a greater detail, or for someone who is very new to the integration space, we are planning to offer a full-service training from Oracle University.

No. Transactions are not as relevant in the cloud as they are on-premises. More often than not, SaaS applications are geared up to handle idempotency issues so that complexity is alleviated from the integration middleware. However, ICS does provide guaranteed message delivery.

Probably not. We have other PaaS offerings coming soon for Data Integration that can help with these use-cases. Please reach out to your Oracle Sales contact for more information.

Yes. You can sign up as a partner and work with us to release pre-built integrations and adapters that you can make available to the broader community. Building adapters and delivering on marketplace enables partner community to be able to design, deliver and monetize on quality integration with SaaS and on-premises applications. For customers, this means they get access to deep and wide integration to a large portfolio of applications.

Yes. This is on our roadmap. We have upcoming capabilities to build long running processes in the cloud. However, the use-cases will be tailored to ensure they do not bring in elements of complexity into the design experience. You can also integrate with an existing SOA BPEL based Web service built using SOA Suite on-premises or SOA Suite Cloud Service instead.

We are working on a highly simplified user experience for partner community integration. In the interim, you can always leverage the B2B capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite in your own hybrid platform.

Integration Cloud Service will natively integrate with a wide variety of PaaS Services including Mobile, Process, Developer, Big Data and so on, providing a highly integrated user experience across the entire Cloud platform.

When we release, you can move your integrations between your environments using a very simple Import/Export capability. An upcoming release wherein ICS will be pre-integrated with Developer Cloud Service will allow you to source control, version and move your integration artifacts between your environments seamlessly, following the principles of Continuous Integration.

There are several dimensions of security that Integration Cloud Service supports.

1. Physical/Data center security – provided by Oracle Cloud Data Centers.
2. ICS Product Security – ensuring that your ICS environment is secured from from external threats and also ensure security of any customer’s data and metadata within ICS ecosystem.
3. ICS capabilities to securely integrate with Oracle’s own SaaS apps on OPC seamlessly.
4. ICS capabilities to securely integrate with any third party Application (generic SOAP/REST API based interface).
5. ICS capabilities to securely integrate with on-premises applications

Together, ICS provides a highly secure environment for your enterprise in the Cloud.

No. For SOA Suite projects/services that you wish to run in the Cloud, Oracle SOA Cloud Service is a better option.

A marketplace for adapters enables customers to benefit from a broad partner community that is building and delivering adapters for several of the 2300+ SaaS applications and on-premises applications out there today. These partner built adapters are audited by Oracle prior to delivery to ensure high quality of integration.

Usage of pre-built integrations, the highly simplified designer interface, the rich and broad connectivity to applications are just a few ways you will accelerate delivery of integrations, reducing time and cost of designing integrations. Also, the service provisioning is fully automated, it runs on Oracle Cloud, and all of patching, backup, recovery, etc. are all managed by Oracle. All of this means that you do not incur the substantial costs of managing and maintain all of this infrastructure on-premises.

As per Gartner, Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.