At its Solutions 2001 conference, Hyperion spelled out the future
of business intelligence software.Hyperion's annual gathering of
its users at Disney World, Florida, last month, showed signs that
the company is finally taking stock of its position as a leading
business analysis software developer, writes Eric Doyle
At Solutions 2001 the firm tried to convince customers that its
products are increasing in scope and power to present meaningful
corporate metrics to every desktop.
Hyperion is gambling on the belief that users are being encouraged
to store raw data - but few packages that collect the figures
actually collate and cross-reference them into meaningful, useful
information.
The arrival of e-commerce is allowing companies to gather
information on their interactions with customers, suppliers and
partners to a greater degree than ever before but the problem is
how to make sense of these metrics.
Companies such as SAP and Siebel may provide the keys to unlock the
data but lack the analysis tools to turn this into business
intelligence.
Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research for the
Datawarehousing Institute, believes that this is the dawn of a new
era which will bring a real understanding of business processes.
The institute is a Seattle-based organisation providing education
and training in the data warehousing and business intelligence
industry, multinational companies and the government sector.
Eckerson said, "I am eager to help evangelise the role that
business intelligence plays in key new markets, such as e-commerce,
customer relationship management [CRM], value chain integration,
personalisation, and B2B marketplaces, among other things.
"Business intelligence professionals are going to play an important
part in helping firms to achieve their strategic visions for the
future."
Hyperion is well placed to take advantage of the growing emphasis
on business intelligence but its first task is to get its house in
order.
Jeff Rodek, Hyperion's chairman and CEO, said, "We have to simplify
our message and accelerate the growth of new applications.
"Until now we have been marketing all of our products as a lot of
individual solutions. This has caused some conflict between the
company message and the marketing of these products and we will be
addressing this over the coming months."
The problem for Hyperion is that the merger of its analytical tools
with Arbor's
flagship Essbase online analytical processing (Olap) server, has
not gone well.
Arbour bought Hyperion in May 1998 but the product lines and sales
teams have remained separate. Integration is Rodek's challenge. He
feels this will be easier because most key personnel were recruited
after the merger, breaking down the dual culture into a single
corporate allegiance.
"It is important for us to carve out our own space in the business
intelligence market. To do this, we will leverage the channel of
over 400 partners to educate and develop awareness among our
customers. This clearer direction will strengthen the culture," he
said.
Among users of Olap technology, Hyperion is easily the leader of a
fragmented market, with more than 40 competing suppliers. The main
threat is Microsoft which has Olap elements embedded in SQL Server
2000 and Excel 2000 - soon to be upgraded to Excel 2002.
Nigel Pendse, author of The Olap Report, said, "The Olap market
currently has no dominant players, and we do not expect any single
vendor to dominate it within the next two years.
"Neither Hyperion Solutions nor Cognos, the two largest market
share holders in 2000, can be regarded as dominant, and several of
the top 10 had a falling market share in 1999 and 2000. The largest
potential player [Microsoft] did not enter the market until the end
of 1998, and its effects are already being felt. But it will not
have the leading revenue market share until at least 2002."
Hyperion hopes to delay Microsoft's rise but it does not really see
the company as a threat. John Kopcke, Hyperion's chief technology
officer, said, "Microsoft supports Olap but we have by far the more
sophisticated business intelligence strategy.
"We are grateful for Microsoft's entry into the Olap market because
it does popularise a technology when they get involved. Our
challenge is to keep our technology ahead of the field."
Kopcke's team is responding by moving the product line from its
general-ledger analysis tools into the Web-based world of CRM and
enterprise resource planning.
For true business intelligence implementation, the software has
also to be able to access data wherever it is stored: in dedicated
financial management databases or more general relational
databases. This move has already started with the initial switch to
a Java-based product and a browser-based Analysis Portal front end.
The current focus of attention is on producing an Olap database
capable of pulling together disparate information from other data
sources. To do this effectively, Kopcke pointed out, means that the
database has to "know" about where the data is held and be able to
track changes, not only in the data itself but also in any movement
of the data's storage location across a company's servers.
Kopcke refers to this database as a "business intelligence
repository" which is still in development by Hyperion. The
repository will be accessed and analysed within Essbase and results
presented to users through the Web-based portal.
The repository will therefore be a crucial element primarily in the
planning and management of a company's financial resources, but may
well expand into more general resource management.
This makes the storage platform much more mission-critical, and
financial modelling using the powerful "what if" capabilities of
Olap, will develop into a more complex model of the business and
its inter-relational elements.
To ensure that this vital resource is robust and always accessible,
Hyperion is also developing fail-over and load balancing
capabilities to allow the workload to be spread across several
servers.
The building of such a resource will be strongly reliant on
standards which have been lacking in the financials world. Hyperion
has been actively participating in the development of the required
standards, such as the Object Management Group's Common Warehouse
Metamodel for metadata modelling and interchange using XML in the
data warehousing and business analysis domains, and the JOlap
Interface effort to develop a pure Java API for Olap servers.
The company has joined with Microsoft to develop XML for Analysis
which will appear this month and allow Olap servers to interact and
exchange data.
Hyperion's product strategy
- Developing Integration Server, as a data repository to provide
access to customer relationship management, enterprise resource
planning and financial data drawn from relational databases
- Extending the reach of Business Intelligence reports through
Web browser access
- Access to data held on other Olap servers through support for
XML initiatives such as XML for Analysis and OMG's Common Warehouse
Metamodel
- Introduction of the Java Olap (Jolap) Interface to allow J2EE
developers access to Essbase servers
- Provision of failover and load balancing support to secure and
accelerate server queries.