Essbase, Oracle’s popular multidimensional technology, is now more accessible to small and mid-size businesses (SMBs), thanks to new pricing from Oracle: $120 per user per month (minimum 10 users) for Essbase Cloud.
This new SaaS-like pricing plan for Essbase Cloud is available to customers that qualify as SMBs according to Oracle’s criteria: essentially, having annual revenue of below $500 million. That’s not a very low limit, so a lot of organizations should qualify and be able to adopt this proven and popular modeling, analysis and reporting application in its most advanced iteration.
Please note that the pricing I describe above is the most recent information I have, and based on an actual purchase of Essbase Cloud about one month ago by one of our mid-market clients. Oracle could change pricing and terms at any time, without notice.
This is full-featured Essbase in the cloud, that lets you build models to analyze business performance, do what-if analysis, and integrate reporting and write-back with Excel using the Smart View add-in for Microsoft Office. Because it’s in the cloud, there’s no need to acquire and maintain hardware or install software. Oracle automatically keeps the software current and optimizes the hardware, behind the scenes.
We’re implementing Essbase Cloud now for one of our clients, an innovative niche mortgage lender. Provisioning (initial set-up) of the cloud account took less than 30 minutes, and now we’re up and running integrating data and developing their solution.
Our client will use Essbase to consolidate data from their cloud General Ledger system to report their monthly P&L and Balance Sheet. In addition, they will load other operational data to analyze key business trends and calculate performance indicators. They will also load budget to track and report actual performance vs. plan. Their solution will contain data going back a few years to give them long-term trends, and update automatically with each new month’s data.
Essbase Cloud will deliver some important benefits to our client’s Finance organization. They’ll have validated financial results and key operational trends available in one place, reducing the chances of calculation and reporting errors. Financial and business performance information will be easily accessible to users through Excel, which means an extremely short learning curve. Users will be able to produce routine reports, do ad hoc analyses and accommodate special requests much faster, saving their time for value-added analysis and being true business partners.
They won’t be limited to just one model – Essbase Cloud allows you to create as many models as you need. Our client is starting with something small and simple, but soon down the road they will be able to apply Essbase to meet a broader range of operational analysis, planning and reporting demands.
How could Essbase Cloud help you streamline your performance analysis, planning and reporting?