Hyperion Unveils New Business Intelligence Platform
Hyperion BI platform paves the way to easier to use dashboards, powerful analytics, robust query and analysis, and reporting
SUNNYVALE, Calif., February 24, 2004—Hyperion (Nasdaq:HYSL), the leader in Business Performance Management software, today introduced its new technology platform, the Hyperion BI Platform. The new Hyperion BI Platform combines the latest version of Essbase, version 7, and the Hyperion Performance Suite version 8.2, into a single platform for business intelligence. It features the easiest-to-use and easiest-to-deploy dashboards, sophisticated but easy-to-use query and reporting tools, the most scalable analytics environment and a powerful developer environment, creating one of the most functionally rich business intelligence platforms available in the software industry.
New Capabilities Shatter the Barriers to Easier Deployment for IT and More Power for Power Users
New predictive analytics empowers users to model the future and predict business outcomes
Significantly improved ease of use for personalized dashboards, enables companies to share information and monitor performance like never before
New deployment capabilities deliver enhanced personalization and security so companies can safely share information across the enterprise and with the extended enterprise
Active performance monitoring with triggers and alerts, bringing real-time, job-critical insight to business users
Inherent application building and customization features, present developers with a powerful development environment for building custom applications
Driving even more reliability, flexibility and performance with end-to-end support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
“We are significantly advancing our business intelligence platform to add new dimensions of ease-of- use, deployment and administration, along with unparalleled performance to enable Business Performance Management,” said Jeffery Rodek, chief executive officer for Hyperion. “Now users from all areas of an organization—from senior executives to managers and individual contributors, from developers to IT administrators—can rely on the Hyperion BI Platform to monitor and improve performance and to gain insight. Hyperion enables them to make business decisions faster and at the right time in the business cycle, with greater ease and less risk than with any other solution available.”
The new Hyperion Platform leverages IBM’s Information Management platform, including integration with DB2 Universal Database, DB2 OLAP Server, DB2 Cube Views and IBM WebSphere infrastructure software.
“IBM is pleased that Hyperion is leveraging the power, flexibility and performance of the IBM middleware platform and DB2,” said Janet Perna, general manager, Information Management Solutions, IBM Software. “The deep integration of Hyperion’s Business Performance Management capabilities with IBM’s middleware platform will provide companies with the best overall time to value.”
Hyperion’s enterprise scalable business intelligence solution connects all levels of an organization, offers access to the right information at the right time and provides the agility to respond to that information swiftly, accurately and decisively. The new Hyperion BI Platform allows organizations to link strategy, plans and execution, and set business direction with confidence.
New Features Across the Platform
Each of the individual products within the new Hyperion BI Platform has been updated to deliver even more power and flexibility for customers.
Bringing the power of dashboards to every user. The new Hyperion BI Platform is more flexible than ever to facilitate the easy creation of unique dashboards for both executives and every knowledge worker in the enterprise. The ability to easily combine both analytical and operational data in a single dashboard view enables IT to quickly deploy dashboards to a wide variety of users inside an organization and to the extended enterprise. And it does this all without requiring expensive integration efforts.
The Hyperion BI Platform is data source agnostic, so customers can quickly create dashboards by instantly pulling data from a variety of sources— such as Hyperion Essbase and the Hyperion Performance Suite, as well as non-Hyperion sources such as databases, general ledgers, sales automation and human resources. Because it requires no time and resource-intensive data clean up or filtering, companies can get up and running quickly. And dashboards built using Hyperion technologies feature new drag-and-drop personalization, enabling users to easily create customized views of information.
“Hyperion brings a unique combination of power, flexibility and ease-of-use to dashboards,” said Rodek. “We think these features will help drive broad adoption of dashboards over the coming years.”
Tighter integration within the Hyperion BI Platform enables better trending and forecasting. For example, users can move beyond simply monitoring marketing campaigns to more sophisticated planning based on expected revenue goals. They can also move from just monitoring the delivery of a shipment, as with other systems, to actually forecasting demand and adjusting the plan dynamically.
Guided analysis within the Hyperion BI Platform offers customers the ability to go from looking at a financial report to analyzing revenue across product lines. With a simple click of a button, users can seamlessly switch from a high-level view of the business to the underlying root cause, showing more detailed information such as cost reports by cost center.
New support for predictive analytics enables customers to model multiple future scenarios and predict business outcomes with new analytics functionality in the Hyperion BI Platform. New powerful analytic capabilities empower users to improve their planning, forecasting and modeling across all areas of the company—from finance to human resources, from marketing to manufacturing. For example, European companies concerned with regulatory compliance such as BASEL II are in a better position to more accurately forecast and ultimately comply with stringent reporting regulations.
Active performance monitoring is achieved with a comprehensive set of interactive alerts and triggers, designed to flag issues such as low-supply levels, increases in supply costs and spikes in demand. The new feature notifies users about potential problems as, or even before they occur, enabling individual decision-makers to implement mid-course corrections for improved future performance.
Out-of-the-box support for XMLA gives customers anywhere, anytime access to data via the Web. Developers and IT administrators can deploy more broadly and quickly across the enterprise, and easily integrate data with other technologies such as corporate portals.
End-to-end support for Linux provides customers with a robust and reliable operating environment for a dramatically lower total cost of ownership.
Powerful sales and marketing analytics is now available via support for MDX, a sophisticated query language that provides support for applications beyond finance, such as market basket and customer analysis. Power users gain advanced query functionality that is extremely useful in determining product profitability and customer analysis. With MDX, customers can utilize the Hyperion BI Platform to create tailored marketing and sales analytic applications for in-depth sales analysis, product mix analysis and consumer segmentation applications.
Cross-platform development environment for custom Business Performance Management applications including support for leading Web services standards means that developers are empowered to build tailored business intelligence and Business Performance Management applications. Hyperion is helping drive the future of XMLA, an open standard that prevents development lock-in by using standard interfaces for accessing multidimensional data.
Support for Unicode offers customers the ability to easily deploy Business Performance Management applications to individuals in multiple geographies, in many different languages, through support for the Unicode standard.
On the Path to Complete Product Integration
Over the past few months, Hyperion has worked closely with customers, partners and industry analysts to create an integration plan and product roadmap for the Hyperion and former Brio products. The new Hyperion BI Platform delivers on the first elements of the Hyperion integration plan described this past fall. Then as now, the emphasis remains on innovation and integration for superior customer benefit.
Just ‘Start Anywhere’ with Confidence
Companies that plan to leverage Business Performance Management to create a solid, performance accountable organization can start by solving their immediate issues first, with confidence that they can easily expand their Business Performance Management capabilities as their goals and budget dictate. Each of the components of the Hyperion Business Performance Management solution can be implemented in any order, based on each company’s unique needs. About Hyperion
Hyperion is the global leader in Business Performance Management software. More than 9,000 customers – including 91 of the FORTUNE 100 – rely on Hyperion software to translate strategies into plans, monitor execution and provide insight to improve financial and operational performance. Hyperion combines the most complete set of interoperable applications with the leading business intelligence platform to support and create Business Performance Management solutions. A network of more than 600 partners provides the company’s innovative and specialized solutions and services.
Named one of the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For 2004, Hyperion employs approximately 2,600 people in 20 countries. Distributors represent Hyperion in an additional 25 countries. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Hyperion – together with recently acquired Brio Software Inc. – generated combined annual revenues of $612 million for the 12 months ending June 30, 2003. Hyperion is traded under the Nasdaq symbol HYSL. For more information, please visit http://www. hyperion.com or call 800 286 8000 (U.S. only).