Oracle marked its aggressive cloud expansion strategy with the release of the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service at OpenWorld last week. The solution forms part of a wider portfolio of Cloud Applications Services already released including ERP Services, HCM Services, Talent Management Services, Sales and Marketing Services and Customer Service and Support Services.
Oracle is enjoying rapid uptake of its Cloud based solutions, currently boasting more than 10,000 customers and 25 million users worldwide. Oracle attribute this success to its ability to deliver instant value and productivity for business users and the fact that customers can choose either a monthly subscription model or sign up to a longer term contact.
The Oracle Cloud is ideal for customers seeking subscription-based access to Oracle applications, middleware and database services, hosted by Oracle themselves. Oracle view the Cloud Service as an enabler, allowing business users to manage the solution directly with no IT involvement.
Planning and budgeting is a resource and time intensive process in most organizations. It tends to be dominated by manual tasks involving a multitude of spreadsheets being exchanged between cost centre managers, line of business finance managers and corporate finance personnel. The goal of the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is to make the financial planning, budgeting and forecasting processes more efficient by delivering the business benefits of Oracle Hyperion Planning in a subscription-based cloud service.
Since the Oracle Planning and Budgeting service is deployed in the cloud it enables users to take advantage of its scalable architecture. This means businesses may implement the system in one business unit or function before rolling it out to hundreds or thousands of users. Furthermore, the cloud based architecture allows for flexible data entry, analysis and frequent real-time updates from anywhere in a safe and secure environment.
Oracle says that this solution provides collaborative planning processes and dependable, centralized application security and data management that significantly reduce maintenance and distribution costs. The service, says Oracle, operates within existing security mechanisms to help ensure maintenance and security consistency.
By eliminating the barriers normally associated with traditional on premise solutions Oracle expects its cloud based services will make it much easier for businesses of any size to deploy a leading planning and budgeting solution in a matter of weeks.
