Are you on-premises people still here? Good. You have a strong will and constitution.
Initially I (like you I suspect) was stunned by this. After promising and promising and promising us Planning functionality equivalent to PBCS (the release I heard was October 2016's) at Kscope after Kscope Oracle have now for all intents and purposes pulled the plug. Yes, there will likely be PSUs in future, but I cannot see how that will encompass what Planning in particular (but Essbase Cloud as well) offers in functionality . In essence, what you have today in on-premises is what you'll get – bar bug fixes and minor enhancements – for now and for the future. Will this be what the audience come Kscope17's Sunday's symposium look like?
Maybe.
Before you lose your minds -- and I am not playing the role of apologist for Oracle -- think very carefully about what you're trying to accomplish with your current install. As John noted (and I'll add on), you have choices in the immediate future:
- Make like the mildly upset (ahem) villagers and threaten to burn Redwood City (or Palo Alto or Sunnyvale or wherever Oracle EPM is) to the ground. This ought to be good visceral fun. <--John may not have suggested this approach.
- Dump Oracle like a ton of bricks and switch to some other company.
- Move to the cloud whether you want to or not. Even if you think it's not for you, it is now. Enjoy.
- Don't do anything at all for the short to medium term. Be like the force of inertia.
All of these choices incur cost. Only you can decide if that cost is worthwhile
Ordo ab hoc
Regardless of what you do, I urge you to think about what your next steps should be.
In short:
- Don't do the "When in danger when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." routine. Fun to watch; painful to be part of.
- Do think about how you can (if you want it) put pressure on Oracle to change their mind. Don't be subtle.
- Do think about what your alternatives are: switch vendors, switch to the cloud, or stay put. (There's always that fourth way of mob violence but I only recommend that as an exercise for the mind no matter how enjoyable it may be.)
Consider something else: a major upgrade to 12c was going to be (as EPM on-premises major upgrades are were) expensive, painful, full of bugs, and yet a chance to reconsider what your system does and why and how. Those precepts (and I suspect the pain) hold true no matter what your change in direction may be, only now the direction is something other than on-premises.
On-premises customers would have faced that transition regardless of EPM 12c or no EPM 12c. Would have this conversion been easier if 12c was released? Undoubtedly yes. But is this sort of break potentially good for you and your company to really think about what you'll be doing two or so years down the road? Undoubtedly yet painfully yes again so there's some good mixed in with the pain and the rage.
That it will never come again, Is what makes on-premises EPM so sweet
What do you think you'll do once the shock wears off? Dance with mad abandon whether that be with joy or with grief? Head for the nearest bar to see how many boilermakers you can drink (bonus points if you are teetotal)? Something else?
Comment care of this blog (or do it to me privately because you don't want to be identified). Oracle read it. I'm not sure they care about it, but they read it.
Regardless, I'm going to take every single one of your comments and forward them directly to Matt Bradley, Mike Casey, Al Marciante, Shankar Viswanathan, and Rich Wilkie and anyone else I can think of in the EPM product management space.
Good luck to all of us!
Be seeing you.
No comments:
Post a Comment