As a Commercial Manager in our Managed Services division, I have been very busy recently trying to fit as many upgrades for organisations as I can into our schedule to meet the December deadline for Hyperion 11.1.2.4, expiring on Oracle Premier Support. Rightly or wrongly, there had been quite a lot of indecision about whether to make the move or stay with a release that is moving to Oracle Sustaining Support and the implications this has. Owing mostly to security concerns with the lack of vulnerability patches post Dec 2021, many organisations have now decided that upgrading sooner is better, but that timeline is now likely to push into early 2022.
When working with organisations considering an upgrade and discussing their options, regardless of the timing, I explain that there is no ‘one size fits all’ choice but a planned, structured approach is best. You will no doubt know that announcing imminent downtime is an easy way of incurring a wave of people in finance throwing their hands up in the air about a lack of advance notice.
Here’s what you should bear in mind based on my upgrade work to date:
No more EPMA in 11.2
Whilst this isn’t an issue for many, EPMA is unavailable with the 11.2.x releases. Customers are required to convert their application to being a ‘Classic’ application and then they have the option of using DRM under a restricted license to manage the metadata. DRM offers much more functionality than EPMA, but time will be needed to get to grips with DRM to configure exports & validations before deploying DRM metadata to application targets. Oracle has published a whitepaper on moving from EPMA to DRM which is well worth reading.
It’s not an in-place upgrade
Unfortunately, you no longer have the luxury of simply applying the upgrade to your current production systems. You are required to stand-up separate environments to perform the upgrade and migration. There will be a lead time for your IT department to procure new environments (regardless of whether these are virtual or physical) and you also need to allocate sufficient time to devise a suitable hardware specification plus associated pre-requisite software.
Administrators need to learn to do a few things differently
Administrators need to allocate time to familiarise themselves with a few new ways of doing tasks. Some utilities and features such as the HFM CopyApp utility have been replaced with functionality in the Workspace, for instance.
It’s largely a technical upgrade
The good news from a user experience viewpoint is that HFM users will not see a change with this upgrade and the vast majority Planning users will not either. The key benefit is that the version of the software being used is newer, and therefore remains in premier support by Oracle and third parties after December 2021.
In summary:
- You will need to be running Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.4 to upgrade to Hyperion EPM 11.2.x.
- You will need to be using Windows 2016 or 2019, Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge to leverage Hyperion EPM 11.2.x.
- No ‘In-line’ upgrade option – Hyperion EPM 11.2.x needs to be installed on fresh Windows 2016 / 2019 servers.
- Understand that some features are no longer available in Hyperion EPM 11.2.x and you may need to look at alternatives.
- Some well-loved client tools are no longer available in Hyperion 11.2.x. This includes Oracle Essbase Studio, which has been removed from EPM System Installer in 11.2.6. Some re-adjustment may be needed to leverage the alternative tooling.
These are just some of the upgrade considerations and there are several options. We have already upgraded many systems and several more before the deadline, so I would be happy to share our knowledge and experience. When you are ready, drop me a line and I would be delighted to have a chat. We are also offering a wider EPM Analysis programme which we can discuss when we speak.
