From several partners we have received the question how we position ourselves versus the new Oracle OBIEE Financial Management Analytics dashboards, also called OFMA.
If you read Oracle’s brochure you might come to the conclusion that OBIEE Financial Management Analytics does the same thing as the CXO-Cockpit Reporting suite does. In fact a lot of the same words that we use to position CXO-Cockpit have found their way to the OBIEE brochure.
We were also recently present at the official launch of OBIEE OFMA product in the UK. It is clearly Oracle’s answer to what CXO-Cockpit has been doing for over 4 years, for more than 40 Hyperion customers on a global basis. OFMA also claims to deliver pre-built, easy to install web-based reports and dashboards for Hyperion FM customers.

First impression:
Besides the initial PowerPoint driven presentation we also had a chance to look at the dashboards that are officially published by Oracle in brochures and via their Web-Site. What struck us most were the very limited output possibilities in combination with the lack of finance intelligence. We are very curious to see what other possibilities OFMA offers, because it became clear to us that the people who have published these graphs are no HFM or finance experts.
In general we very much miss the finance intelligence that Finance people look for in an HFM related solution. We truly encourage you to take a detailed look at these examples, because it is surprising to see that, with this world-wide launch of the OFMA product, everything testifies to the fact that these dashboards are not built by finance people but by IT people with very little HFM background.
The differences:
Nevertheless, the first impression of the OFMA product can impressive but slightly deceiving. There are a lot of differences between both software products you need to be aware of. Whether you are a Hyperion customer evaluating a new dashboard solution for your Hyperion application(s), or if you are a Partner trying to advise your Hyperion customers, please be aware of the following structural differences:

• CXO is full of true finance intelligence and CXO is specifically built for Hyperion products
• CXO delivers the Hyperion reports in a way the management want to see them
• CXO is typically owned by finance, requiring hardly any IT involvement
• CXO is delivered extremely quickly, avoiding long and expensive IT driven BI projects
• CXO is a proven solution with over 40 large multinationals using our software
• CXO is risk-free with our 2 to 3 day Proof of Concept
• CXO licenses are subscription based making our TCO 100% predictable and way lower than OBIIE
• CXO delivers a free and professional iPad app to their customers

Do not be fooled by words:
This new OBIEE based OFMA product for HFM is still a BI product and you would simply not be able to run such a BI solution autonomously within your finance team. This means a larger dependency on IT knowledge, which in fact means: being dependent on others.

CXO-Cockpit is 100% run by the same people that run the Hyperion applications and it is often delivered on the same hardware platform as the existing Hyperion products. Reports and Dashboards are created and maintained with the greatest of ease by the same people that do that already today with SmartView or Hyperion Financial Reports.

Additional key information:
We know that some arguments for not considering CXO-Cockpit keep circling back to us. The most heard arguments are that 1) we do not have a live connection to HFM and 2) that we miss flexibility within our reporting templates. With one of our latest releases we have introduced many new useful features and we can therefore confirm that:

• CXO does have a live connection to HFM
• CXO does have flexibility with our Free-Style template (please see screenshots below)

Our advice:
If your company already owns OBIEE licenses and you have the OBIEE knowledge available within the IT department of your company, this particular OBIEE solution could potentially be a valid option for you. Still you need to be aware of the extremely limited finance functionalities of OFMA.
If however, you do not own OBIEE and you are just using the Hyperion products, building dashboards with OBIEE OFMA will deliver very limited output. Furthermore, buying OBIEE OFMA will require deep pockets because you need an HFM, OBIEE and OFMA license for every single user. It will prove to be a very costly and top-heavy solution that will not deliver what your finance community is looking for in a web-based reporting tool on top of HFM.

Prove:
If you are in doubt whether OBIEE OFMA is the correct product for you or your organization, please challenge Oracle to perform a short Proof of Concept. The proof is, as with many things in life, in the pudding.
As a final remark we want to share this interesting quote from an HFM user. “It appears to us that Oracle does not have a clear vision as to who is the end-user of the OFMA product. Oracle seems to be aiming it at Finance Managers since, for example, they present a process management dashboard. Users who are interested in that data tend to be very comfortable with getting analytical data from HFM directly via SmartView or Reports. They would not need a very expensive dashboard to produce that type of data. We believe that this version of OFMA does not have the content nor the clear and simple looks to attract the executive audience and move them away from PDF and excel”.
Thank you for your time.

Please find below a couple of screenshots from our all new “freestyle” reporting template: