Oracle Essbase Reviews

Very large and complexes environments implementation, 10000+ users with 24x7 global operation and multiple EPM tools working in sync.

It provides for faster and more assertive forecast cycles. It enables businesses to improve their process since with this tool, you can do things easily and quicker as the business can create more complex models than were possible before.

It's very flexible and powerful and can do almost anything you want if you use a bit of imagination and knowledge.

Everybody uses it for financial purposes, but it can also be used for other analytic purposes, such as mathematical models, statistical models, and so on.

• It needs a faster way to extract data.
• It needs better documentation, as there's a lot of undocumented commands.
• It needs a better API.

More than 12 years.

There were issues mainly because of a Java memory leak and abnormal shutdowns that sometimes corrupt the cube.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support helped me in something. The problem is bigger when you have an environment with more than one product like Hyperion Planning and ODI.

This happens because the products have different owners within Oracle and then different supports and, because of this, if you open a trouble ticket of loading data to planning and you say the words ODI, you'll be push around the two separate support teams indefinitely.

Even if your company has an Oracle support director just for you.

I've always used the same tools.

EPM is an enterprise suit that is made of some independent tools and to have all of them working together makes it complex no matter your level of knowledge. The bigger the environment, the bigger the challenge is you need to face. Maybe one day Oracle will integrate all their tools. It'll be easier, and the good thing is that I saw a lot of improvements through the years.

Always talk with a Oracle representative and negotiate a discount. I already saw 99% of discounts and a free licence once.

Some times is cheaper if you get a hardware together (helps to negotiate a discount)

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and, during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results is as good as the people who implemented them. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it can be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementation for 20 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws, but most of time (99%) it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.