Here’s a scenario I see playing out across organisations right now. Finance teams have invested significantly in TM1 — IBM Planning Analytics — but somewhere along the way, the platform stopped feeling like a competitive advantage and started feeling like a liability.
Excel is creeping back in. Enhancements are taking months. The system goes down at the worst possible moment. And in many cases, the entire environment is held together by one or two people who are a single resignation away from becoming a crisis.
I’ve spent the last twenty years working with TM1 environments across every size and industry, and this pattern is remarkably consistent. The tool is rarely the problem. The way organisations run and support the tool — that’s where things break down.
In our recent webinar, I walked through the three pillars that we believe will modernise any TM1 environment — without starting over, without a costly eighteen-month project, and without breaking the things that already work.
The first thing we audit with any new client is their infrastructure. And almost without exception, on-premise sites are running on versions that are three to five years out of date. That’s not a criticism — it’s the reality of how upgrade cycles work when there are competing priorities and limited IT resources.
The consequences are real: technical debt, security exposure, and a platform that’s increasingly hard to build upon. IBM ended support for versions 10.2 and below in April 2024. If you’re still on one of those versions, this conversation is urgent.
Today, there are three infrastructure options:
On-Premise: Full control, but the patching, security, and upgrades become your responsibility. In our experience, we have yet to encounter a single on-premise site running the latest version. Not one.
IBM Managed Hosting (IBM Cloud): IBM runs the platform for you. Upgrades are managed. The infrastructure burden shifts away from your team. This is a strong option if you want to focus budget on functionality rather than keeping the lights on.
AWS (PA on SaaS): The newest option, and in our view, the most compelling for organisations starting fresh or migrating today. Version 12, fully cloud-native, elastic RAM scaling in 16GB increments, and the lowest infrastructure overhead we’ve seen. Available in Australia and multiple other markets.
The economics matter here. On-premise can appear cheaper until you account for the IT time, upgrade projects, and security management it demands. Cloud pricing continues to decline. And migration itself is more straightforward than most teams expect — we have a dedicated team and a tested checklist that handles the move, including legacy Excel macros and TI processes that need extra care.
One important point: moving to the cloud is not modernisation on its own. If you move poor architecture onto better infrastructure, you still have poor architecture. Infrastructure is the foundation. Architecture is the next conversation.
Legacy TM1 models accumulate debt in predictable ways. Different consultants come in over the years, each doing good work for the specific problem in front of them. But when you look at the model as a whole, the design may no longer reflect where the business is, or where it needs to go.
Some common symptoms we encounter:
Rules logic so layered over the years that no one can fully trace a number back to its source
Hard-coded dimension logic that makes even routine changes risky
Bloated, unused dimensions sitting in models and consuming memory
Critical processing knowledge living only in the head of one person
Metadata-driven design. Month rollovers, version changes, and business rule updates happen by changing a config cube — not by touching code.
Purpose-built, modular cubes. A separate staging layer, a core calculation layer, an input layer, and a reporting layer. It looks like over-engineering until you need to scale or change something.
Decoupled reporting. Reports connect to the relevant cubes and update automatically. Changes to the underlying model don’t cascade into manual reporting fixes.
Designed for change. The model is built for what the business will need, not just what was required at the time of build.
In some cases, we encounter, the accumulated technical debt is significant enough that a full rebuild is actually cheaper and faster than attempting to refactor what exists. We’ve seen organisations consider switching platforms entirely — not because TM1 couldn’t do what they needed, but because internal friction around a legacy model made change impossible. That’s a solvable problem, and it starts with an honest architecture assessment.
This is the pillar that makes the most immediate difference, and the one most organisations have never properly addressed.
Traditional TM1 support looks like this: something breaks, someone raises a ticket, a consultant is engaged, investigation starts from scratch. The same issues recur every month. Knowledge lives in one person’s head. There are no SLAs, no health checks, no road map.
The data on this is stark. Around 60% of TM1 support spend goes into reactive work — fixing things that have already broken. Studies consistently show it costs three to five times more to fix production issues than to prevent them. And approximately 40% of finance teams report that Excel shadow models are running alongside TM1, filling the gaps where the platform is too slow or too broken to serve the business.
Modern managed support changes this. The key features:
Proactive health monitoring: Continuous environment monitoring rather than waiting for users to report problems
Finance calendar alignment: Support resources and capacity planned around budget cycles and month-end close, not allocated reactively
Defined SLAs: Users know what Priority 1 means, when the clock starts, and what happens next
Recurring issue elimination: Every resolved ticket is reviewed. Is this pattern recurring? If so, it goes into the backlog for a permanent fix
Knowledge transfer: No single-point-of-failure dependency. Multiple team members hold model knowledge, documented in a living knowledge base
The outcome, based on our work with clients across this model: a reduction of approximately 35% in total cost of ownership within the first several months and through optimised licensing, reduced reactive spend, and the compounding benefit of preventing issues rather than repeatedly fixing them.
Modernisation does not need to be an eighteen-month programme. Here is what a practical timeline looks like:
Audit the current architecture. Review support history — specifically, what tickets have recurred in the last six months and why. Assess infrastructure options and costs, including licensing implications. Align IT, security, and finance stakeholders on the direction.
If migrating to the cloud, schedule and complete the migration. Begin architecture improvements, prioritised by business impact. Onboard managed support. Early benefits typically become visible around month four.
Quarterly architecture reviews. Continuous performance tuning. Regular training as new features are released (IBM ships updates roughly every six weeks on the cloud). The knowledge base and road map stay live. Once this rhythm is established, improvements compound.
These are outcomes from actual client engagements, not projections:
Faster budgeting and month-end cycles: When the platform is stable and changes can be made quickly, the cycle compresses
Significant reduction in data errors: Proper architecture catches exceptions before they reach users
Zero outages during month-end: This is a bold statement, but it’s what the data shows when the foundational work is done properly
Finance teams spending more time on analysis than administration: The tool starts doing what it was bought to do
There is also a forward-looking consideration. If your organisation has any kind of AI strategy that involves TM1 data — and most do, or will — the data foundation has to be reliable. A platform that crashes at month-end is not a foundation you can build AI capability on. Modernisation is not the end goal. It is the prerequisite for everything that comes next.
Octane Solutions is an IBM Gold Partner with over 100 TM1 projects delivered and the #1 IBM Partner award in the APAC region. We work with organisations globally — across Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, India, the Middle East, and North America — on a flexible, no lock-in basis.
Our support tiers (Octane Green, Blue, and Black) are transparently priced on our website. If you’re not sure where to start, a complimentary health check will give you a clear picture of where your environment sits and what to prioritise.
Contact us: media@octanesolutions.com.au
Or reach out to Amendra directly on LinkedIn to discuss your environment.
If you’re on version 10.2 or below, or still running on-premise without a plan to move — this conversation is worth having today.