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Hyperion and Teradata to integrate products; Pivotal's most significant CRM update

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 05/14/2003

Hyperion Solutions Corp. and NCR Corp.’s Teradata division announced a new partnership in which both firms will work to integrate their products and technologies.

As a result, both companies say, customers who use Teradata's warehouse and analytic products will be able to link to Hyperion's Essbase XTD platform and applications to gain greater insight into financial performance.

In addition, Teradata says that its financial management product stack—which includes the Teradata warehouse, along with industry logical data models (LDMs) that integrate data from multiple ERP systems and other applications—will now include the Hyperion Essbase XTD platform.

The companies plan to expand this offering by jointly developing a Teradata Hyperion Adapter for the Teradata warehouse. This will facilitate bidirectional data movement between the Teradata industry LDMs and Hyperion’s business performance management (BPM) applications. The upshot, say Hyperion and Teradata, is that companies will be able to more quickly gather and analyze information to drive immediate business decisions.

Finally, the two companies announced plans to develop Teradata Financial Analytic Accelerators (TFAA)—reporting and analysis tools built on Hyperion Essbase XTD. TFAA will access integrated and detailed financial data within the Teradata warehouse and will provide a quick means for users to construct tailored analyses and reports to make critical business decisions without relying on technical support.

According to Mike Schiff, a principal with data warehousing consultancy MAS Strategies, the current agreement expands on a history of partnership between Hyperion and Teradata. For example, Schiff points out, Hyperion currently supports drill through to Teradata (which allows its applications to drill down to detail data in Teradata itself) in addition to hybrid analysis with Teradata (which allows Hyperion’s applications to treat Essbase and Teradata as a single OLAP data source from a logical perspective).

Teradata will resell Hyperion's Essbase XTD platform as part of this joint effort. It currently has reseller agreements with Business Objects Inc., Cognos Inc., and Microstrategy Inc.

Hyperion has OEM agreements with other RDBMS players, such as IBM Corp., which markets Essbase under the DB2 OLAP Server brand.

Pivotal Revamps Mid-Market CRM Offering

Pivotal Corp. announced Pivotal 5, a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed for mid-size enterprise environments.

Pivotal 5 is the CRM vendor’s first major product release in more than three years.

With a new product for complex solution selling, integrated marketing automation capabilities (via Pivotal MarketFirst), a new user interface, and several platform improvements, Pivotal representatives say that Pivotal 5 is the most “significant” release in company history.

New in Pivotal 5 is Pivotal Assisted Selling, part of the Pivotal Sales 5 toolset. Based on technology that Pivotal acquired from Exactium, the product consolidates sales automation, guided selling, complex quote creation, and price/product configuration capabilities into a single module.

Also included in Pivotal 5 are Pivotal Marketing 5, a marketing automation module that includes technology which Pivotal acquired from MarketFirst; Pivotal Service 5, which includes a portal component; Pivotal Contact Center 5; and Pivotal Partner Management 5.

Pivotal 5 is based on Microsoft’s .NET framework.

Existing Pivotal customers with updated full maintenance contracts can upgrade to Pivotal 5 for free—although they’ll have to pay a fee if they want to use its new marketing automation and assisted selling modules.