My company is called ProfitFromERP. We help people select and implement ERP solutions. I don't personally use Hyperion day to day, but have clients who've selected and grown with the program. Hyperion historically has been a high-end tool for financial planning and analysis groups who want to create things like forecasting models and work with real-time data and events in-progress to update rolling forecasts.
Hyperion is useful for advanced financials, reconciliations, and other things that traditional accounting and reporting solutions don't do. Some people use it for their SEC reporting and things like that. Others are trying to compile data from multiple sources - various databases and transactional systems.
For example, we've got hockey teams that cross-reference ticket data and information from third-party concession stands to get a complete picture of what's happening in their entire stadium. It provides them with real-time information from point of sale systems, Ticketmaster, and gate scanning systems, all so they can optimize staffing in every section and maximize revenues by having the right staff in the right place.
Hyperion has always been a top financial solution, but it had the reputation of being complex and not-so-easy to use. As with any complex & powerful program, with the right training, users could really do some amazing things. In the early days, implementing Hyperion was complex, but implementing any enterprise software in the early days was complex. Experience was the key - if you had great consultants and a top FP&A team, it was a dream. If not, nightmare stories were the result. Today, with modern cloud-based systems everything is easier, not easy, but easier to implement.
There's also been significant development around Hyperion. We've had clients look at Hyperion in ERP evaluations circa 2016 - and there were new cloud versions, but the functionality just wasn't there. One of the things we school our clients on is the rush to convert to the cloud has many software products with a two or three-year cloud history that initially look great, but later just don't have the breadth and depth of features. They'll look great in initial demos but later you find key requirements that it just won't handle. This can be a real problem - so we make sure our clients dig a little deeper.
Fast forward to 2020-ish and all of the sudden we saw NetSuite clients choosing Hyperion, or at least seriously considering it. Technically, Oracle had launched a version called SuiteSuccess Planning & Budgeting and it was all based on the Hyperion Planning code.
NetSuite has always had good base financials and really handy features like saved searches for repeated reporting. But when it comes to advanced financials, historically, most NetSuite resellers presented Adaptive Planning, which was so tightly integrated it appeared as just another module on the NetSuite home page.
We also had Advanced Financials clients evaluating Host Analytics, Anaplan which started to emerge, Workiva, as well as BI tools like QlikView and Tableau. One of the joys of cloud-based NetSuite was how tightly we could integrate with almost any other cloud-based tool.
When Oracle brought NetSuite back into the fold via a $9B acquisition, of course, Larry Ellison was an early seed investor in NetSuite, but the merger brought NetSuite's cloud expertise and cloud market share and factored Oracle's massive development efforts to rapidly expand NetSuite's offerings in several ways.
They launched that cloud version of Hyperion with the goal of becoming nearly plug-and-play integration with what NetSuite was doing. That's when our NetSuite client base began to really take another look. Plus some of the firms that had selected Adaptive back when it was sold as NetSuite Advanced Financials, those companies had really grown and what had fit well with a $400m company was hindering a $900m company.
