The IBM Apptio platform is a technology business management solution that enables organizations to make better decisions about technology investments. It connects technology spend to business value so organizations can adapt to changing market conditions.
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Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Oracle's Corporate Performance Management suite was acquired from Hyperion in 2007. Hyperion customers are encouraged to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM.
Oracle Cloud EPM is also used by my company and we used it as our primary budgeting and forecasting tool before Apptio was implemented. Apptio is much more versatile to use. It's easier to get the information you need how you need it. I couldn't imaging going back to …
IBM Apptio: 1. Track and Allocate cloud and on-premise costs across departments. 2. Compare planned budgets versus actuals spend in real time. 3. Provide Business leaders with transparent insights into how IT Investment drive business outcomes. 4. Enable show back models to ensure accountability and optimize resource usage. 5. Report Usage, where we can see the actual data regarding the users information and activity and track.
Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.
Does very well at handling complex allocations and automation. Also great at bringing in data automatically, manipulating that data, and allowing you to feed that data into a complex model. So all the behind-the-scenes stuff works really well. It's also pretty good at visualization. It has some similar capabilities like a Power BI and Tableau, but generally provides most of the visualization technology that somebody would need with the tool.
This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs.
It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error.
It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules.
Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus.
It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly.
One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house.
The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module.
Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on.
It is hands down the most innovative SaaS on the market today. In my humble opinion it will be just as big or bigger than Salesforce, Workday and all of the greats. I would advise any big company to take advantage of Apptio and renew on an annual basis with their support team!
We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.
We use this currently where I work and we have the consultant Maryville helping us with our Apptio reports and data. I originally used Apptio a few years back and since then I have switched employment, and I was able to talk to the leadership team about what we did at my previous job, and now we are building the reports here at my new place of employment
I have not been directly involved with the post sales support team. However, that team has provided training materials and recommended practices that have been very helpful in coming up to speed on how to more fully use the product. My understanding from both vendor management and our upline stakeholders is that our relationship with Apptio is strong.
The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.
Was awesome to have been taught by legendary Debbie Hagan for Cost Transparency in person. Her knowledge is extensive and she is an excellent trainer. Her years of experience really shined.
The all talented training organization crosses all the T's and dots all the I's. I am constantly learning and often refer to training documentation for post training real life issues.
Well, so far. Apptio Consulting covered specific model architecting areas particularly. Most of the heavy lifting is being done in-house with support from Apptio as it relates to tool impacts and needs. Some administrative tasks were redundant
So we've used Proven Optics, which is an add-on to ServiceNow. Well at least use it with certain customers and Nicus. Nicus is probably the biggest competitor of Apptio. The trouble with Nicus is their SQL-based ingestion process. It's a little bit more difficult. So the reason why you'd go with Apptio is that it's very easy and very intuitive to bring in new data sources and being able to model a lot of the data once it's already in the system doesn't require a lot of coding experience.
I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.
It's delivered on a lot of those, especially the relationship between IT and financing that relationship's been a bit of a rollercoaster on that journey. We've come out the other end of it, and we're all friends now, which is a good thing. So they've accepted the Apptio output and are much more involved in providing the data and helping to use the tool, which is excellent. I think one of the downsides that are probably not talked about enough is the fact that, um, once you have trained and delivered a TMB skillset within your organization, they become very good at that. So if you've got any high-performing members in that team, they become extremely valuable elsewhere. And we've unfortunately suffered the case whereby one of our highest performers was immediately then poached and went off elsewhere for a much better opportunity. So we applaud that for them, but it's really hard to train other people. It's really hard to take them up to speed, and you have to sort of go through those picks and troughs every time. So that's just life, you know.
Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge.
Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data.
One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it.
