Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence...Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence Summary Based on Essbase XTD Analytic Services, XTD is a more complete business
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Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
Summary
Based on Essbase XTD Analytic Services, XTD is a more complete business intelligence platform thanoffered previously, with hybrid analysis, query and reporting, and application development options.
Table of Contents
Overview
Analysis
Pricing
Competitors
Strengths
Limitations
Recommended Gartner Research
Insight
List Of Tables
Table 1: Overview: Hyperion Essbase XTD
Table 2: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD Architecture and Analytic Services
Table 3: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD Administration and Deployment Services
Table 4: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD Client Reporting Tools
Table 5: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD Application Development Tools
Table 6: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD Integration Services
Table 7: Features and Functions: Hyperion Essbase XTD—Third-Party Support
Table 8: Price List: Hyperion Essbase XTD
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
Hyperion has more than 60 application partners that deliver applications on
Essbase that include compensation planning, Web-site analysis, budgeting, supply
chain analysis, vertical applications for energy, insurance and retail.
—A complete list is available at www.hyperion.com/alliances.cfm.
Analysis
Hyperion Essbase XTD, a BI platform, is based on Hyperion Essbase, an OLAP engine that has been oneof the most successful OLAP server products. Hyperion’s strategy for Hyperion Essbase XTD is toprovide a platform for supporting Corporate Performance Management applications. With Essbase XTD,Hyperion is offering a comprehensive BI platform (which does include Crystal Decisions’ Reports andEnterprise as key query and reporting components) rather than relying on just Essbase XTD AnalyticServices, which nevertheless remains their crown jewel.
Hyperion Essbase XTD Analytic Services provides scalability, performance, distributed architecture andOLAP application integration. Based on a multitier architecture, Hyperion Essbase supports multiuserread and write access; large-scale data capacity; robust analytical calculations; flexible data navigation;and consistent, rapid response times in network-centric environments. By multithreading HyperionEssbase “Agent,” which essentially performs traffic management in Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion hasenabled Hyperion Essbase to manage multiple, simultaneous user logins and multiple applicationsrunning on a single server. Hyperion Essbase XTD’s open architecture supports direct data access usingstandard spreadsheets; third-party query, reporting and BI tools; and Web browsers, as well as the use ofrelational databases for data access. Hyperion Essbase supports cross-platform deployment to Unix,Windows NT and AS/400 servers.
Although Essbase continues to use the operating system’s I/O, it bypasses the operating system’s filecache to optimize Essbase’s disk use. A server-based caching option allows the storing of more ofHyperion Essbase’s data (compressed blocks) in physical RAM. Dynamic calculations are much faster,because uncompressing and calculating blocks that are in RAM are much faster than having to firstretrieve them from the disk. This also eliminates swapping data to and from disk. A dynamic calculatorcache helps manage memory usage for calculations involving Dynamic Calc members. Managing datablocks in the dynamic calculator cache also reduces the overall memory space requirement and canimprove performance by reducing the number of calls to the operating system to do memory allocations.
If Essbase thinks something is or should be in its RAM cache, it can avoid the operating system’s havingto swap the cache to disk. According to Hyperion’s own testing, it has seen between 5 percent and 50
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
percent performance increases for loading and calculation, depending on the application. Because of theamount of data that can be stored in RAM, Hyperion claims that some Essbase applications can be runentirely in memory, eliminating disk I/O. Users have complete control over application memory usage,with the option to lock any or all of Essbase’s data and index caches in physical RAM, which also offers aperformance boost. Write-back transactions are first sent to memory and committed to disk with fulltransactional integrity.
Essbase XTD’s Analytic Services provide more than 250 calculation functions, and users can also createcustom functions and macros in Java. Robust, interactive analytic functionality includes attributes andstatistics for sales and marketing analysis; time series intelligence and forecasting functions formanufacturing and distribution analysis; and financial intelligence and multiuser writeback for profitabilityanalysis and other financial applications.
Hyperion Essbase XTD Q&R (which includes Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise) provides reportingfrom multiple data sources, including relational databases, operational systems and OLAP cubes.Essbase XTD Q&R delivers formatted and interactive content, which is published to the Web in a varietyof formats and can be integrated with other applications.
While Hyperion focused on creating OLAP server technology in its early years, it leveraged Excel andLotus as the client interface instead of building its own. Using the Hyperion Essbase spreadsheet client,users can access the Hyperion Essbase server and analyze data from their familiar spreadsheet. Initiallylacking a complete solution of its own, Hyperion partnered with other third-party tools vendors tosupplement the tools they were lacking. Such support included integration with third-party tools, includingmore than 50 front-end tools (such as Crystal Decisions’ Crystal Reports and desktop OLAP viewers,such as Business Objects’ BusinessObjects Explorer and Cognos PowerPlay), ETL tools, data miningand portal solutions. Essbase XTD Q&R, which includes Hyperion Crystal Enterprise and HyperionCrystal Reports, comprises a content management and delivery platform built for the Web. It providesquery and reporting from various data sources, including relational, ERP, CRM and Hyperion Essbase.Hyperion also has added its own front-end functionality, so customers can use Hyperion Analyzer for theirfront-end analysis requirements and Hyperion Reports, which provides formats for financial reporting.
Essbase XTD Platform Services are a set of BI technologies that integrate data and metadata frommultiple sources, perform advanced OLAP and deploy Corporate Performance Management applications.Comprehensive platform services run on multiple operating systems, leverage multiple relationaldatabases and access data from diverse operational systems. Integration Services provide graphicalinterfaces and services to integrate data from relational databases, flat files, spreadsheets, XMLdocuments, Web logs, metadata from data warehouses, operational applications and legacy transactionalsystems. These tools use centralized, reusable metadata to automate the process of creating andmanaging analytic applications from relational data sources, such as data warehouses, data marts,transaction processing applications and ERP systems using Hyperion Essbase XTD Analytic Services.Integration Services enable drill-through to detailed data in relational stores, as well as Hyperion’s HybridAnalysis, which enables data to be subdivided between Essbase cubes and the relational store andtransparently accessed by users.
The Essbase XTD Application Framework is a toolset that enables creation, delivery and deployment ofanalytic and reporting applications for the Web. Analysis Studio provides interactive analysis andreporting to user communities. Developer Workbench combines with Analysis Studio to rapidly create,manage and deploy custom analytic reports and applications for the enterprise. Whereas HyperionObjects is a set of OLAP-aware ActiveX components for creating applications based on Essbase,Application Builder is based on the J2EE platform and offers Web-deployable templates with pre-builtfunctionality that can be assembled into applications.
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
Hyperion Solutions offers a line of BI applications software too (Hyperion Performance Scorecard,Hyperion Strategic Finance, Hyperion Business Modeling, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Pillar, HyperionFinancial Management and Hyperion Enterprise). Out-of-the-box solutions provide a quick path tointeractive analysis and reporting. Graphical development tools allow users to extend or build customanalytic applications to meet their needs. However, Hyperion’s suite of applications is not fully integrated.Hyperion Financial Management, for example, does not use Essbase as its engine, but has its owncalculation engine.
Pricing
Table 8: Price List: Hyperion Essbase XTD
Product Description Pricing ($)
Essbase XTD Editions
Essbase XTD Classic Edition • Per base server product
• Includes Essbase XTD
Analytic Services,
Spreadsheet Add in,
Essbase API and Hyperion
Business Rules
10,000
• Per end user 1,500
Essbase XTD Standard Edition • Per base server product
• Includes Essbase Classic
and Analysis Studio*
40,000
• Per end user 1,800
Essbase XTD Power Edition • Per base server product
• Includes Essbase Classic,
Analysis Studio*,
Developer Workbench**,
Essbase XTD Q&R and
Essbase Integration
Services
• Analysis Studio* includes
Hyperion Analyzer,
Hyperion Reports,
Hyperion Central and
Essbase XTD Spreadsheet
Services
• Developer Workbench**
includes Hyperion
Application Builder,
Hyperion Analyzer API and
Hyperion Objects
60,000
• Per end user 2,100
Essbase XTD Integration Services • Per base server product
• Unlimited users
• An option for data and
metadata integration
30,000
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
Hyperion Application Builder • Per base server product
• Java development
components
15,000
• Per end user 300
Essbase XTD Q&R • Operational query and
reporting
Included as part of
Essbase XTD Power
Edition
*Software Maintenance—18 percent per year.
**CPU pricing is also available.
GSA Pricing
No.
Competitors
Hyperion Essbase XTD’s major competitors in the BI platforms market are Microsoft SQL Server 2000Analysis Services and Oracle 9i OLAP Services. Another BI platform competitor is The SAS Institute’sSAS/OLAP Server and SAS’s application development, integration and deployment tools. While EssbaseXTD does offer most elements of an EBIS, it—like SAS’s tools—has primarily been marketed as aplatform for developing and deploying BI applications. To provide some EBIS capabilities, Hyperion hasentered into an agreement with Crystal Decisions to package and market Crystal Reports and CrystalEnterprise as a major element of their reporting solution (some integration has been done and more is inprogress). This represents a clear change of direction for Hyperion and starts to put it into more directcompetition with some of its partners, like Cognos and Business Objects, for the front-end viewingbusiness. On another aspect of competition with Cognos, although Cognos Series 7 is an EBIS and not aBI platform, Cognos PowerPlay is an OLAP server. It is not as scalable as and does not have the robustfinancial calculation capabilities of Hyperion Essbase. However, for straightforward OLAP applications(reading and aggregating data), PowerPlay can suffice and so it does represent competition.
Whereas Hyperion Essbase XTD, Oracle 9i OLAP Services and SAS’s OLAP products support both Unixand Windows NT environments, Microsoft’s Analysis Services supports only Windows NT. AlthoughHyperion Essbase can support a variety of applications, as does its competitors, its origins were as afinancial consolidation and analysis engine, so it has extensive financial calculation functionality built inand is better able than its competitors to handle complex financial applications. Hyperion EssbaseAnalytic Services (OLAP Server) also is popular because it is not specifically tied to an RDMS vendor,
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
meaning that customers are dealing with a best-of-breed product rather than being a “captive” of a single-source RDBMS vendor. Microsoft’s Analysis Services requires that applications use the MultidimensionalExpression Language (MDX) to interface with it (which is quite cumbersome to use, not unlike Hyperion’sMaxL). Because Microsoft doesn’t offer a convenient graphical development tool, third-party vendors,such as ProClarity and arcplan Information Services, have appeared to fill this gap. While their OLAPproducts are not truly “closed,” Microsoft, Oracle and SAS are most popular with customers who are usingtheir other products, whereas Hyperion presents a more neutral choice for customers. With itscomprehensive set of BI applications development tools and Hyperion Essbase XTD Analytic Services,Hyperion provides a BI platform that rivals Oracle’s and SAS’s and is currently more complete thanMicrosoft’s.
Hyperion—as do Microsoft and SAS—provides proprietary languages for accessing and leveraging itsOLAP databases and functionality, whereas Oracle uses SQL to accesses analytic workspaces, not anOLAP API, which would provide more robust functionality geared to OLAP. Oracle also has an OLAP APIbased on the old Express multidimensional 4GL and still supports “JOLAP” or “Java OLAP API,” which ithad hoped would become a standard, but which has not.
Strengths
OLAP Application Functionality
While Hyperion Essbase XTD supports nonfinancial applications, Hyperion has focused on providing toolssuitable for financial applications. Hyperion Essbase XTD has extensive analytical functions—more than250—and read/write support suitable for many analytic applications, particularly financial ones. It has arobust scripting language for server-based dimensional, procedural and statistical calculations. Importantcapabilities that support complex applications include partitioning, which supports parallel processing, anddistributing OLAP application models across LANs and WANs; the models can be linked. Data inmultidimensional data stores can be linked with data in relational data stores.
Analysis
Essbase Analytic Services has analytic functions for forecasting and trending and profitability models,including linear regression and exponential smoothing. Correlation calculations can assess large sets ofnumbers and provide a numeric score to indicate how directly they vary with each other. Attributedimensions in Essbase Analytic Services support a fine-grained analysis of detailed data. Queries canfilter data based on multiple attribute dimensions, supporting comparisons without the explicit storage ofdimensions (for example, numeric values, dates).
Scalability and Performance
Scalability features include support for distributing applications across multiple servers and linking ornavigating partitions. Partitioned applications support “parallelized” models, which may be loaded, queriedand calculated in parallel on parallel processing computers.
Users can choose whether Hyperion Essbase validates formulas on the client or on the server. Server-based calculations support the thin-client model for scalable Web deployments. Dynamic calculationsenable the application designer to choose when calculations are performed to optimize performance.
By bypassing the operating system’s file cache and by a server-based caching option, Hyperion Essbasemakes use of RAM to speed up processing. Users have complete control over application memory usage,with the option to lock any or all of Essbase’s data and index caches in physical RAM (applications can berun entirely in RAM). The dynamic calculator cache helps manage memory usage for calculationsinvolving Dynamic Calc members. Managing data blocks in the dynamic calculator cache reduces the
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
overall memory space requirement and can improve performance by reducing the number of calls to theoperating system to do memory allocations. Calculating attribute dimensions on the fly means that thedata-loading process is faster than if the data had to be calculated and stored at data-loading time.
By multithreading the Hyperion Essbase “Agent,” Hyperion has enabled Hyperion Essbase to managemultiple simultaneous user logins and multiple applications running on a single server. Essbase also canexport databases natively using multiple threads.
Query Performance
Hyperion Essbase’s multidimensional OLAP query performance exceeds that of relational OLAP solutions(ROLAP). Rapid response times also stem from Hyperion Essbase’s pre-calculated, aggregated data andoptimized index techniques. By contrast, ROLAP solutions use SQL to access relational databases, whichis inherently slower, requiring complex joins and multiple passes through large datasets.
Open Platform
Hyperion Essbase supports cross-platform deployment to Windows 95/98, Windows NT (Intel), Solaris,HP-UX, AIX, AS/400, OS/390 and Linux servers across all major networks and supports mixedtechnology environments. Open architecture support for storing data in relational databases includesOracle, IBM DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and Teradata.
Hyperion Essbase offers a published API that has been widely adopted by more than 100 industry-leadingtool vendors, application developers and consulting firms. There are more than 60 analytic applicationpackages available on the Hyperion Essbase XTD platform from Hyperion and its partners.
Hybrid Relational Database Support
While Hyperion Essbase supports drill-through to detailed data in relational databases, it also supportsHybrid Analysis. In the latter case, some of the data is stored in the Essbase multidimensional OLAP(MOLAP) store and some in a relational data source, making it possible to combine data from both storesin a single application. This supports the requirement of scaling to support very large databases,particularly those where the detail data is to be accessed for OLAP purposes. This scalability comes witha price, however, which is that performance suffers. A major reason for using the Hyperion Essbasemultidimensional store rather than a ROLAP solution is that it will exhibit much better performance as thenumber of concurrent users increases.
Reporting Tools
Hyperion offers Hyperion Reports for financial reporting and Hyperion Analyzer for Web-based interactiveanalysis against Essbase XTD Analytic Services while also providing drill-through to relational data.Hyperion Essbase also has extensive third-party support with more than 50 front-end query and reportingtools and desktop OLAP viewers. Hyperion also has entered into an agreement with Crystal Decisionsand offers Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise as Essbase XTD Q&R. With these complementaryproducts, Hyperion is capable of offering a complete solution for customer needs.
Application Development
Application development is supported for desktop and Web. The Developer Workbench includes HyperionApplication Builder—a Java-based development tool to create custom BI applications or extend out-of-the-box applications—and Hyperion Objects—a comprehensive set of OLAP-aware, 32-bit ActiveXcontrols for developing OLAP applications based on Microsoft’s COM architecture. It leveragesapplication development environments that support ActiveX controls; for example, VB and Visual C++.
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
Hyperion Analyzer API Toolkit offers developers the ability to extend Hyperion Analyzer with custom Web-based analytical applications.
Limitations
Reliance on Third-Party Tools
To complement its Essbase XTD product family, Hyperion for a long time relied on third-party tools toprovide a total BI platform while they focused on their Essbase OLAP Server (now called HyperionEssbase XTD Analytic Services). While now they do offer some of their own front-end tools, they still relyon third parties. Although Hyperion offers Hyperion Reports and Hyperion Analyzer, the great majority ofcustomers continue to use third-party front-end query and reporting tools. Hyperion most recently enteredinto a partnership with Crystal Decisions that allows Hyperion to bundle Crystal Reports as part ofEssbase XTD. When Hyperion Essbase is interfaced with these complementary products, it is not clearthat all the interfaces are truly seamless or that all of the native functionality on either side is exposed oravailable. In addition, if these partnerships don’t endure, customers may have to migrate to other tools.
Crystal Decisions Partnership
Until there is better integration and rationalization of reporting products (which Hyperion says is inprogress), Hyperion has a duality of reporting products (Crystal Reports and Hyperion Reports) and is notfully leveraging the Crystal products. It can’t yet leverage Crystal Enterprise for report distribution, otherthan for Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports is the stronger reporting product, but Hyperion Reports containsspecific financial reporting functionality. However, the absence of this functionality in Crystal Reportswon’t allow a single reporting solution based on Crystal Reports, which doesn’t have this functionality. Inessence, Hyperion Reports is competing with Crystal Reports other than for financial reporting. Inaddition, Crystal Analysis Professional, Crystal’s OLAP viewer, is not part of Crystal Decision’s deal withHyperion because it would compete against Hyperion’s own, capable Analyzer tool. This partnershiptherefore exists within a competitive framework and raises questions as to whether customers candepend on its continuation.
Integration With Crystal Reports and Enterprise
Crystal and Hyperion metadata structures are not integrated, and Crystal Reports is not integrated withHyperion Application Builder and Analyzer. Crystal Enterprise is not integrated with the Essbase platform.
ODBC Dependence
Hyperion Essbase Integration Services supports native access only to Oracle and Sybase, but otherwisedepends on ODBC—rather than native database drivers—for loading data from other RDBMSs. ODBCaccess may have performance implications, which may or may not be material, depending on thefrequency of data loading, as well as implications for SQL drill-down.
Time-Consuming Loading Process
Hyperion Essbase, like any OLAP server, requires a data-loading process that can require from minutesto many hours to accomplish, depending on the nature of the data and the number of aggregations or pre-calculations. Dynamic calculations can mitigate pre-calculation during loading, however, and parallelcalculations take advantage of SMP hardware. ROLAP solutions also have to build aggregate tables andindexes, which also takes time.
Recommended Gartner Research
• BI Magic Quadrants: Excitement in a Flat Market, M-18-9988
Hyperion Solutions Essbase XTD Business Intelligence
• Vendor Rating: Hyperion Solutions Returns to Its Roots, VDR-19-0969
Insight
The most successful OLAP server-based product has been Hyperion Essbase; however, this is beingstrongly challenged by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. Oracle 9i OLAP Services is anotherpotential challenger, but it has gotten off to a slow start in marketing. Although focused on financialapplications in its early years, Hyperion Essbase has been equipped to handle analytic applicationsacross all other business functions too. Currently, in a return to their roots, Hyperion’s strategy forHyperion Essbase XTD is to provide a platform for supporting Corporate Performance Managementapplications. With Essbase XTD, Hyperion offers a competitive BI platform, including querying andreporting and application development, although some of the technology comes from partners. BecauseHyperion also sells Corporate Performance Management applications, customers can acquire theirapplications and the underlying platform from the same vendor (although not all applications areintegrated with Essbase). Enterprises that wish to have a single business intelligence and CorporatePerformance Management vendor should give Hyperion serious consideration.