Although a good number of us Oracle OpenWorld 2016 (OOW) attendees are still recovering from the madness last week, it’s time to get back to work. The OOW attendance figures are flying in and some are very interesting.

It’s time to have another conversation about FCCS (Financial Consolidation & Close Cloud Service). This budding Oracle EPM Cloud consolidations & close solution made big waves at OOW. One of the fixtures in the Oracle world for FCCS, Rich Wilkie, gave me permission to share his attendance metrics (which he’s super excited about):

• The FCCS Customers Present panel was one of the top 10 EPM sessions attended
• FCCS sessions comprised 5 of the top 10 EPM sessions attended
• The FCCS demo pod was the highest attended EPM pod

There has been much buzz about this product both before it was released and after. I have many theories as to why this might be:

• FCCS is a consolidations tool built upon an Essbase backend (although it’s really EPBCS). It was rumored for years (decades?) that this day would come and it’s finally here.
• ^^ This also means that the technical skill set now crosses over three very large EPM technology spaces: HFM, Essbase, and Planning. This equates to a larger audience and it’s quite possible that you’ll see more Enterprise Planning Cloud consultants working on FCCS projects.
• The big push to Cloud. There are thousands of customers on Oracle EPM Cloud, across all solution sets. Thousands. Based on personal customer conversations, folks are curious about how to get on Cloud themselves and why so many customers are moving there so quickly.
• There aren’t a lot of consolidations & close blogs and webinars. One of my consolidations ODTUG friends shared this with me in April and then gave me a guilt trip about posting more about FCCS to help them all out (it kinda worked). Therefore, there isn’t a ton of information out there about this product. Less information = more curiosity.
• And finally, the most obvious one: Oracle is doing a fantastic job getting the word out there about this new consolidations solution.

Regardless of the reason, it’s clear that this cloud-based solution is on the rise. My company has received questions from existing on-prem customers about how to move off of HFM and onto FCCS. We also receive a ton of questions regarding the differences in features between the two technologies, although they are very different technically. In addition, there is a lot of interest from smaller customers who have no formal consolidations tool (or a sub par product).

What I do know and can share vaguely about FCCS is the following:

• There are more customers than I imagined. Rich shared the stats with us prior to OOW. It’s not in the hundreds or thousands, but I was surprised considering that the product was just released less than 6 months ago.
• More than a handful of customers will be going live on FCCS by the end of the calendar year.
• There is significant interest in the FCCS roadmap. FCCS was a little behind on its promised feature set when it was initially release. I believe they have now made up for all of those delayed features, in addition to fixing a number of bugs.
• There are still many feature gaps between HFM and FCCS. One of the Oracle’s main priorities is closing that gap and as quickly as possible. I would not be surprised to hear that HFM is FCCS’s biggest competitor in the consolidations space.

In addition, here’s a preview of a detailed FCCS vs. HFM features comparison matrix that I’ve been working on with other consolidations experts at interRel.

More will be revealed as we continue to sharpen our skills (and we secure permission to share some of the expected #SafeHarbor dates). We hope to release this information in a future webinar/blog post.

So what does the future hold for FCCS? As the horizon continues to point to full parity between HFM and FCCS and the successful Go Lives go viral, the future for FCCS looks bright, my friends.