Companies wrestling with how to support complex IT infrastructures — especially ones running sophisticated enterprise platforms such as Oracle Hyperion — often assume that outsourcing support services to a remote managed services provider is simply too expensive, or too risky, or too inefficient to be seriously considered. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, partnering with a third party managed services provider can actually reduce both risk and cost while increasing overall infrastructure and application reliability.
Many companies assume that paying IT administrative salaries, as a relatively fixed operating expense, is going to be more cost-efficient than the perceived open-ended expense of a third party service contract with a flexible statement of work (SOW) that may allow the managed services provider to increase hourly fees without much recourse. In fact, the opposite may be true. Skilled and experienced Hyperion administrators are favored by a seller’s market, and one of the biggest issues for these employers is high Hyperion admin turnover. As a result, unexpected loss of productivity during the period of time no administrator is on the job — coupled with the added expense of hiring, training, and equipping a new admin — can quickly rack up costs, compared to partnering with a qualified and reliable Hyperion managed services provider working under a detailed SOW.
The nature of Hyperion administrative work often results in an admin being directly active managing Hyperion apps such as Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) for only a week or so out of the month, coincident with monthly financial closes and reporting. The rest of the month, he or she may be engaged in other, non-Hyperion-related finance or IT tasks.
The Hyperion managed services alternative in this case can be extremely cost-effective, with an SOW contract that specifies, say, one week of service a month to provide support during financial close periods. This 100-percent-Hyperion-related expense is, in most cases, substantially less than the full-time expense of an admin performing part-time Hyperion tasks. In fact, large organizations often require two full-time Hyperion admins — one for financial support, the other for planning and other business support needs. In situations requiring two full-time admins, the cost of employees can run approximately $250,000 in salaries alone. The cost of contracting with a managed services provider for essentially the same Hyperion administrative tasks generally runs about 30–40 percent of employee salary expense and provides the client with support services from a dependable source of experienced Hyperion professionals and highly qualified experts in every Hyperion application. Because the bulk of regular maintenance and support can be handled remotely through network access and the cloud, a managed services provider becomes even more cost-effective.
Just as important, outsourcing Hyperion administration to a leading, trusted managed services provider introduces a level of stability and reliability often unavailable with in-house employees in a high-turnover position.
