Month: July 2025

EPM Cloud 25.08 Updates – TLS, JRE, ARC Pipelines, Oh My

The EPM updates for 25.08 were released and we have an update to the TLS changes. Oracle has decided to continue supporting TLS 1.2 indefinitely, but only with ciphers deemed to be strong. The extension of support for TLS 1.2 gives Oracle and its customers a welcome bit of flexibility. Oracle has also released a document on how to test with the latest TLS ciphers document here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/tsepm/cloud_epm_test_tls_ciphers.html

EPM Automate is switching to Java 17 instead of Java 8. Windows users rejoice! With the EPM Automate “update” command, EPM Automate will download and install the Java 17 runtime environment as part of the update process. Linux/Unix and Mac users will need to update their user-installed Java version to continue using EPM Automate 25.08 and after. Java 8 was released over ten years ago, so it’s good to see a newer version is being implemented. Linux/UNIX/Mac OSx users can go here to find how to update their Java version: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/cepma/installing_epm_automate_linux_unix.html

Account Reconciliation Cloud is getting Data Integration Pipelines with this update. Pipelines will be available on ARC pods with the following job types:

  • Create Reconciliation
  • Generate Report for Account Reconciliation
  • Import Attribute Values
  • Import Balances
  • Import Pre-Mapped Balances
  • Import Pre-Mapped Transactions
  • Import Rates
  • Run Auto Match
  • Run Auto Alert
  • Set Period Status

This should mean that we can define ARC jobs on any EPM Data Integration Pipeline and cross pods (similar to how we can run EDM exports across pods with Pipeline).

Before we go, I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate the deprecation of the Data Management/Data Integration job schedules. If anyone out there has braved the pain of that scheduler, those scheduled jobs need to be converted to the EPM Platform Job Scheduler before the 25.09 update. There is a System Maintenance Task job in Data Management called “Migrate Schedules to Platform Job Scheduler” to help with that effort. The EPM Job Scheduler isn’t available in PCM and ARC, unfortunately. If you use either of these business processes, scheduling outside using EPM Automate or rest calls is probably your best bet (and likely what most other customers are using anyways).

Oracle EPM AI features deliver on promises from long ago

I have accepted the fact that I am getting old (or is it “more experienced”?). At this point, I have been working on and around Oracle EPM products for almost twenty years. In the early 2000s, I was getting data from Hyperion Enterprise before we installed Essbase to do reporting. I dove into Essbase and began learning as much as I could. Once I reached a point where I felt I had done everything I could at my position as an administrator, I moved into consulting in 2010 to continue developing myself and learning more. As part of that, I took some training on OBIEE to help support customers with BI installs.

My point is, for 15+ years (maybe 20) EPM and BI users have heard about the promise of self-service BI: empowering users to analyze and visualize data independently. I remember hearing this in my OBIEE training and it was exciting to think about users digging into the data to answer business questions.

The thing with BI products is that there has to be someone technical to connect all of the data sources on the back end. It takes a special someone to figure out the right strings to pull to get all of those data sources normalized and linked up so that end users can do their reporting and analysis. It may be my bias as an implementer, but I don’t know how far users go past the initial dashboards that get created. I certainly hope it’s more common than I have seen.

As I sat in the Kscope Sunday Symposium presentations by Oracle product management and heard about all of the AI features coming to Oracle EPM, it dawned on me that all of the amazing things that I imagined 15 years ago will soon be possible and more accessible than ever. Users will soon be able to to chat with the AI built into Oracle EPM products and get visualizations fed back to them. To recycle an old sales pitch, analysis at the speed of thought is about to be real.

I am looking forward to seeing the developments in Oracle EPM products and I’m excited to see what our customers do with them. You can find the current AI features available in Oracle EPM products here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/fusion-ai/aiafl/epm-features-with-ai.html. That list is about to get much longer. These are exciting times we live in.