Lost in the cloud?

Do you know where you are in the cloud spectrum or are you lost? Do you know where your Hyperion infrastructure really is or is your head in the clouds. On this post, I will try to clarify what the three main "cloud" deployment terms are and hopefully you can locate yourself and understand where you are.

With the advent of the cloud and services like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Gmail and, of course, salesforce.com, there has been a lot of confusion on what people are calling the cloud. In reality, the cloud has been with us always, we just didn't call it that.

Private Cloud:

This term is usually used when software is installed by either internal IT staff or consulting firm on infrastructure that is owned by the client. The client owns the infrastructure and also owns the licenses to the software. This is typically what an "on premise" installation means. You have full visibility on the hardware, software, installation and configuration of the app being installed.

If you have Oracle EPM  installed on infrastructure that you own, you are here.

IaaS (hosted solution):

Infrastructure as a Service is used when a client installs (either by an IT staff or consultant) a piece of software on hardware infrastrcture that is leased. The hardware and o/s maintenance and management is typically handled by the firm leasing the hardware while management of the application can be either handled by the client's IT, the leasing firm or a third party. You may or may not have visibility to the hardware being used to provide this service. Examples of this are Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, etc.

If you own Oracle EPM licenses but do not host it internally, you are here.

SaaS (subscription based):

Software as a Service is used when the client pays a subscription fee to use software that is owned and managed by the company selling the subscription. Salesforce.com, iCloud, Office 365 are perfect examples of this type of deployment. The client does not own the license nor the hardware in this type of deployment. Also management of the application (up time, redundancy, disaster recovery, etc) is managed by the firm providing the subscription service.

If you have purchased PBCS, you are here.

Currently, for Oracle EPM there is one service that was released earlier in 2014 called Planning and Budgeting Cloud Services (PBCS).  However, Oracle has chosen a few select partners (Infratects is one of them) to test out what they are calling project "Kepler". Kepler is the PBCS release that Oracle uses but for partners to be able to provide the same service to clients. Kepler is still in Beta but it will allow partners like Infratects who provide IaaS type of services with managed services and support the ability to sell subscription based Hyperion Planning to clients. 

Hope this clarifies a bit on the "cloud" terminology and the differences between types ofdeployment. 

Infratects can offer any of these types of solutions with datacenters in Europe and the US. Also, soon we should be able to provide SaaS services as project Kepler matures.