15 April 2005 Business intelligence (BI) vendor Hyperion has unveiled a fleshed out version of its main application suite in an effort to extend its appeal beyond traditional roots into corporate performance management (CPM).
The new Application Suite 4 provides one single point of access to a business planning, reporting, financial management and analysis, and has a new Microsoft Office style interface.
Hyperion has redesigned its user interfaces to make them more intuitive, while adding a dashboard to allow businesses to track compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
“People understand and like Microsoft Office so we’ve tried to replicate it as much as possible. Users can develop a plan, download planning templates and develop budgets offline in Excel and then reconnect,” enthused Rich Clayton, Hyperion’s product marketing VP.
This latest release is a staging post in Hyperion’s longer term strategy, which it dubs Project Avalanche. This is an effort to improve the ability of its tools to link with multiple applications, a step vital to its vision of providing truly powerful CPM tools; it is scheduled for completion in 2006.
But while Hyperion has established its credentials in proving analysis tools for financial consolidation, it faces a battle establishing a more widespread appeal through CPM. According to author of the influential OLAP report, Nigel Pendse, the financial consolidation market “is not ripe for growth. There’ll be a small amount of replacement and upgrading, but Hyperion is under attack from Cognos and Microsoft in expanding fields like planning and OLAP.”
Hyperion’s preliminary financial results for its third quarter of the 2005 financial year indicate its expects to grow revenues by just over 15% year on year.
