ERP Associates, Inc.

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."

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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.

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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. 

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I’m going to Oracle OpenWorld again this year, and I just finished building my schedule.  Wow.  This year there are so many sessions I want to attend in the same time slots that I won’t be able to see a fraction of what I want to.  Guess I’ll have to skip the session on how to author blue-ray disks using Java in favor of a product roadmap session I need to attend.  You see, I’ve started a new project and I have a whole laundry list of stuff I need to come up to speed on.  I’m sure it’ll be an informative but exhausting week – it always is.

Gazing into my crystal ball, I’m expecting to hear more about the Fusion applications that were introduced at the end of the 2009 OOW.  I think Oracle isn’t re-inventing all of the functionality in their mature ERP/CRM product lines like PeopleSoft, JDE, EBS, and Siebel.  But all the same I’m expecting to see some products that are ready for launch and looking snazzy with the deep integration with BI and other apps that Oracle has invested so heavily in.

Speaking of BI, I’m looking forward to seeing the new release of OBIEE.  BI apps just look cool, and their functionality makes things like PeopleSoft Matching functionality seem boring in comparison.  I'm hoping to see support for a ton of data sources and the ability to publish interactive reports to latest generation mobile devices.  Unfortunately I think I missed the BI boat at some point in my career, so bring on the 3-way match!

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Servers are becoming more powerful as manufacturers are finding new ways to get more cores into a CPU.  Today it’s not uncommon to see hexa and octa-core processors shipping at the same price points the dual- and hexa-cores shipped yesterday.  Where manufacturers once got their performance improvements through raw CPU speed, they are now getting their getting the majority of performance improvement through more cores in their processor chips.

Unfortunately the economics of additional cores for performance aren’t the same as improvements through improved clock cycles because software manufactures have largely tied their technology licensing to the number of cores on a system, and their pricing isn’t decreasing as the number of cores on these new servers increase.

For example, say you buy a basic server with two hexa-core processors, so you’re looking at 12 cores on the box.  Now let’s suppose the list price for Oracle Database is $47,500 per core.    So your list price to run an Oracle database on your new server will be $285,000.  And that’s not counting tuning packs, diagnostic packs, management packs, or even maintenance -- which is calculated as a percentage of the base price.  It turns out the cheapest part of this equation may be the hardware!

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Remember the old days (circa 2006) when doing disaster recovery involved shipping tapes to an off-site storage facility and provisioning emergency hardware at a disaster recovery facility?  Well, fast forward to 2010 when virtually unlimited hardware and disk storage are cheap and plentiful.  Making real-time backups to the cloud (with the right software) is not only doable but almost a no-brainer.  But once your backup is in the cloud, the next logical step would be to launch a virtual instance of the server that you backed up.  But that’s like, Star Trek futuristic stuff, right?

Well no more.  CloudRepica has a Software as a Service offering that does just that.  Their enterprise-grade replication software is capable of creating real-time disk images of any server.  Then they combine that with the unlimited disk resources and phenomenal reliability of the cloud to create a real-time disk backup and recovery service.  This offering is packaged and delivered in a Software as a Service model where you pay only a monthly fee.  There are no upfront costs, no licenses, no hardware, no media, no consulting labor and no facilities costs.

So here’s how it works:  CloudReplica installs their replication software on one of your Microsoft servers.  This isn’t any run-of-the-mill software either.  It’s an industrial-strength, lightweight, flight-level replication software that’s been in use by large enterprises for 16/17 years.  Technically, it uses a non-blocking filter/driver which listens for changes at the byte-level, which means only the portions of the files that change are replicated and there are never any locks because of the replication.   The changed bytes are compressed, encrypted and transmitted to one of their cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon or Teramark, where the identical disk image is maintained.  Features within their replication software insure that you can always bring your system back to a good known restore point.

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Suppose you have a spreadsheet full of invoices that you want to load to PeopleSoft.  If you’re running PeopleSoft 8.9 or later, that’s easy. You use the voucher load spreadsheet to get them into the system and then run Voucher Build to turn them into vouchers.  But what if you want to load Single Pay vouchers?    That’s something that the spreadsheet voucher load won’t handle.

Okay, so maybe use the ExcelToCI spreadsheet to populate the VCHR_EXPRESS component.  Good luck with that.  If you’ve ever tried then you’ll know all about the "First operand of .null" error.   I spent some quality time with a component interface built off of that component and the PeopleCode debugger.  Unless you’re ready to change some PeopleCode --  maybe a lot of PeopleCode --  I don’t recommend it.

I had one client create a couple of SQR’s to upload single pay vouchers as regular vouchers, then change them to single pay vouchers after voucher build runs.  That solution works well (and if you want to know the details let me know), but if you’re not looking for a high-volume solution it might be overkill.

I recently stumbled across a way to do spreadsheet uploads with a simple spreadsheet macro that doesn’t depend on component interface.   Basically you make an Excel macro open up a browser and key the data in for you.

Before I explain how it works, I just want to let you know that you need to be familiar with Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.  You also need to know a little about Application Programming Interfaces (API’s).  And a little knowledge about the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) wouldn’t hurt.  But if you meet most of these qualifications you shouldn’t have any trouble at all in making this work – no special PeopleSoft App Designer access or knowledge required.

And one more caveat:  This was built on PeopleTools 8.48 and Financials 8.9.  Due to how the script works it’s likely it won’t work for PeopleTools releases beyond 8.49.

Consider the following Excel VBA macro:

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Sure, Amazon Web Services is great for geeks and small companies with nothing to lose, but what if your company is in the Fortune 1000? Can you really trust Amazon (or any cloud provider for that matter) with your employees, vendors, customers, and all of the associated confidential data like credit card numbers and tax ID’s?

That’s something I’ve been struggling with lately. We have successfully used AWS to spin up demo environments of PeopleSoft Enterprise, Hyperion, GoldenGate. We used demo data as opposed to any customer-specific data which has been fine so far. And I must say that AWS is an incredible tool to get the software up and running and build a sandbox for evaluation purposes. But the next logical step would be to use AWS to host conference room pilot and prototyping environments to support our initial requirements gathering efforts. Beyond that we’ll want to build Dev and Test environments. And all of these environments will need real data from existing systems.

We can certainly procure the hardware and host these environments in house, but I’m thinking about AWS because we could postpone our hardware purchases until closer to the end of the requirements gathering phase when we can be more precise about our needs. So I did some research and here are some of the things I’ve learned.

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In my recent podcast I interview Karen from Chesapeake Energy about Chesapeake's PeopleTools 8.50 Upgrade. She was generous enough to share their issue list, and so I wanted to pass it along. I hope you find it helpful!

The new auto-complete functionality does not allow you to select using the mouse. You must use your up and down arrows and the ‘Enter’ key.

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Here are the long-awaited videos from our PeopleSoft 8.9 Installation Exercise from February 15th. You'll remember that was the day I needed to install PeopleSoft 8.9 on to an AWS instance, and I decided to do it in a GoToMeeting session so whoever wanted to could "look over my shoulder", ask questions and participate. It was more of a collaboration than a training session, and there were plenty of times I hit issues that the group bailed me out on. So I learned a lot, especially about SQL Server. Hopefully everybody else did too.

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