Amazon Web Services is Ready for the Enterprise
- 04 Aug 11
Amazon has been steadily moving toward making their web service offering ready for the enterprise. Over the last year or so they've received certification for Oracle database, they've broken down the barriers that would prevent PCI certification, and they've improved their pricing structure to make it more corporation-friendly.
Today they may have finally broken the final barriers down to large scale enterprise adoption with the following announcements:
Virtual Private Cloud is now out of Beta and allows you to "provision a private section of the AWS cloud where you can create avirtual network that you control, including selection of an IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration or route tables and network gateways. you can connect your Amazon VPC directly to the Internet while also extending your corporate data center to the cloud using encrypted VPN connections."
But the announcement of Amazon Direct Connect might be my favorite. "Amazon Direct Connect is a new service that enables you to bypass the internet and deliver data to and from AWS via private network connection. With a private connection, you can reduce networking latency and costs, and provide a more consistent network experience while moving data between AWS and your datacenters. With pay-as-you-go pricing and no minimum commitment, you pay only for the network ports used and the data transferred out from AWS over the private connection."
There's also new functionality for AWS Identity and Access Management that lets you use your existing corporate identity management system to grant secure and direct access to AWS resources without creating a new AWS identity for those users.
I'm excited about the possibilities this opens up in terms of on demand computing capacity in the enterprise.
Managing Chartfields and Trees Across PeopleSoft and Hyperion
- 26 Jul 11
If you’re implementing Hyperion applications to complement your PeopleSoft Financials application, one decision you’ll have to make relatively early is which tool to use to manage your core dimensions and their associated hierarchies. Here are the options:
- Native Functionality
- Hyperion EPMA
- Hyperion Data Relationship Management
So which one is the right choice? Based on my research and discussions with Christopher Dwight, a member of Oracle’s Master Data Management practice, here’s what I have learned:
The native functionality basically means you’ll maintain your dimensions in each application separately. So if you want to add a department, you’ll have to add it to PeopleSoft, then Hyperion Financial Management, then Planning separately.
Hyperion EPMA provides a robust, single point of administration for EPM applications. It allows you to create a dimension library which allows several EPM dimensions to be centrally stored and re-used across multiple EPM applications. Basic dimension editing capabilities are provided. Individual dimension elements ("nodes" or "members") can be flagged for use within a specific application, supporting slightly different application requirements while promoting dimension re-use. Although this feature has potential, each member must be individually flagged, limiting the usability for large dimensions. EPMA is intended to support only Hyperion EPM applications, and to be utilized by system administrators, not the typical end user.
DRM is different in that it was conceived from the start as an agnostic enterprise dimension management platform, and not beholden to Hyperion EPM applications alone. As such, DRM can be deployed to support financial metadata and dimensions in a myriad of systems, ranging from PeopleSoft to GEAC to SAP to Cognos to Teradata to Hyperion and many more. It was also design to support not only system administrator users, but also to allow business users to become direct contributors into the dimension management process.
Data Warehousing Made Easier
- 16 Dec 10
I was talking to an Oracle sales rep this week about OBIEE. Since this is a PeopleSoft blog I guess I’d better explain. OBIEE is Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering. It’s solidly in Forrester’s leader’s quadrant and it has all of BI features you would expect (reporting, ad-hoc analysis, dashboards, alerts, etc). The question at hand was why we should implement it when we already have some perfectly good BI tools with committed users who truly believe in them.
We didn’t get into a deep discussion about BI features. Everybody knows what a BI solution should do by now, and the leading tools do it well enough that there’s not much differentiation (at least from how I interpret the Forrester recent report). So what difference does a BI tool make at this point?
I’m not sure what the Cognos or MicroStrategy reps would say, but Oracle laid out an interesting case. If your enterprise applications are built around Oracle applications like PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Siebel, or EBS and Essbase, you can get out of the box functionality that no other tool can match.
Last Updated on Thursday, 16 December 2010 04:19.
