Now that Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) has been released, the Oracle EPM/BI community is eagerly trying to get up to speed on this shiny new toy. There are videos to watch (or promises of?), the Oracle formal website, and now a series of blog posts from the release day blog hop. In addition, Oracle published the official OAC online documentation. Although helpful, the documentation is a bit ahead of its time. The Oracle product development team is still catching up to the features promised in the eBooks. We hope to see an updated product in June.

In the meantime, I know that a lot of long-time Essbase developers are curious about how EssCS (Essbase Cloud) compares to their beloved on-prem Essbase tool. I’m going to start by saying that they are very similar products. The foundations are the same – EssCS is built upon Essbase 12c. However, the purposes of each product and the development cycles vary quite a bit.

There are also many other features that are different. To give you some fodder to consider, here are two feature comparison matrices that I put together (with some help from my buddy, Glenn Schwartzberg), in preparation for one of two short OAC talks that I’m giving at Collaborate17.

Caveats: #SafeHarbor and the obvious statement that this is a blog post, so…my understandings may not be 100% accurate on every single detail, but directionally correct. In addition, OAC was just released. This means that the product will make some big shifts in the first few months as bugs and kinks are worked out and delayed features are added.

EssCS vs. Essbase – What They Have in Common

EssCS vs. Essbase – What’s Different

If you want to stay up to speed on EssCS and get sneak previews of the product, I recommend that you keep track of the following bloggers. These people are on the front lines, working closely with the Oracle EssCS Product Development team, and are keen on deconstructing all of its wonderful components:

• Tim German, Qubix
• Cameron Lackpour, ARC EPM Consulting
• Glenn Schwartzberg, interRel
• Sarah Zumbrum, Oracle

See you at Collaborate!