Oracle Hyperion vs. Toad Data Point

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.

Incentivized

Appropriate for general querying and some DBA work. It's the universal least-offensive solution for most environments - not best of breed, but not subject to unusual/extensive requirements. It just works. On the other hand, some functionality (e.g. data import/export, snippets) are perfunctory and minimal and seem to be either difficult or impossible to automate. If you need to streamline those operations, you'll be forced to rely on third-party solutions that mostly work on top of (instead of with) TOAD.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Export data into excel.
• Export data into excel using a pivot table functionality.
• Navigation between windows is intuitive and easy to understand.
• Good for SQL novices and experts alike.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The workflow is a relatively new feature. Quest is adding additional functionality and the workflows are useful now.
• Would be nice if the 'Automate' feature was a bit easier to use.
• Would be nice if some of the SQL Editor features in the traditional interface worked better in the new workflow interface (although, these are being fixed with each release).
• Would be nice if there were fewer releases.

Incentivized

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.

I find Toad Data Point easy to use for both the novice and the experienced business analyst. If all you desire is to access data and create spreadsheets...this is a snap. Toad Data Point actually has cool data analysis features built into it. The newer workflow interface makes automating steps a snap

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Although Toad and UltraEdit are both great products, from an SQL standpoint Toad is a much better editor and troubleshooter.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It is the least common denominator - not particularly optimized for our environment or workflows.
• Hangs or slowdowns add anywhere from 5% - 7% for projects utilizing large/complicated data setts. (This could be due to other IT-imposed constraints and not entirely due to TOAD.)
• Trying to perform some operations requires reading documentation and experimenting in order to figure out the TOAD-specific approaches and commands.
• It just works (when we understand it). Updates don't break things and things don't suddenly start behaving differently. Best of all, we don't mysteriously lose functionality.

Incentivized