Hyperion Ships Essbase OLAP Server 6

With companies rapidly incorporating business analysis as a mission-critical enterprise platform and service, Hyperion announced the general availability of Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server 6, the new version of Hyperion's market- leading, open, cross-platform, enterprise OLAP server. The new version delivers enhanced performance, scalability and sophisticated analytics to help thousands of corporate decision makers across the extended enterprise to optimize e-business effectiveness; enhance customer, partner and supplier relationships; streamline supply chain systems; and improve overall operational and financial performance.

Already the strategic OLAP (online analytical processing) platform for more than 3,000 customers and 350 partners, Hyperion Essbase 6 extends Hyperion's leadership in the OLAP market. Industry analysts estimate the OLAP market will surpass $3 billion by 2003. Hyperion Essbase 6 offers Hyperion customers and partners an enterprise-class OLAP platform for new business analysis applications in areas such as e-business, trading exchanges, and customer service centers, in addition to enabling business analysis applications for financial management, manufacturing, sales and marketing. By driving the entire range of business analysis across the enterprise, Hyperion Essbase 6 helps organizations increase the return from their investments in e-Business, CRM and ERP systems and improve top- and bottom-line performance.

"Hyperion Essbase 6 offers our customers and partners an unparalleled platform for business analysis across the enterprise," said Steve Fioretti, vice president of marketing for Hyperion. "The new version helps organizations capitalize on emerging opportunities in business-to-business analysis, as well as deploy mission-critical applications across areas such as retail/e-tail, consumer packaged goods, financial services, healthcare, telecommunications and manufacturing. Widespread beta customer and partner enthusiasm for Hyperion Essbase 6 extends Hyperion's leadership in delivering mission-critical OLAP technology that enhances performance across all areas of the business."

"META Group continues to see explosive growth and demand for analytic applications that address a broad range of traditional and emerging markets," said Mark A. Smith, program director in META Group's Application Delivery Strategies. "With an increasing number of ISVs building analytic applications on Hyperion Essbase, and new advanced attribute and calculation features that address a range of sophisticated business analysis applications, analytical application software companies, like Hyperion, are well positioned to help organizations capitalize on these opportunities."

New Capabilities Provide Customers and Partners With Industrial-Strength OLAP Platform for Business Analysis

• Expanded attribute analysis - Users can associate additional text, numeric, and date information, or "attributes," with the data elements in their analytic applications built on Hyperion Essbase 6. This dramatically expands analytical capabilities across descriptive categories such as demographic segments, product types or online behavior characteristics.
• Increased performance and scalability - Hyperion Essbase 6 supports enterprise-wide user communities accessing multiple, linked business analysis applications in multiple geographical locations. With a single platform for accessing and analyzing disparate data from e-business, ERP, transaction, financial, customer service and other systems, users across a company can make strategic business decisions based on the most current information, and gain a single, integrated view of customer, supplier and partner relationships.
• Sophisticated business calculations - Hyperion Essbase 6 offers new calculations for forecasting, trending, statistics, and profitability modeling. These calculations allow users to move beyond historical reporting and analysis to anticipate and model changes in market and business conditions and analyze the impact of business decisions. Organizations can leverage these rich calculation capabilities to gain insights into areas such as operating performance, customer profitability, pricing elasticity and on-line marketing effectiveness. These new calculations add to the hundreds of existing functions in Hyperion Essbase for deploying a broad range of analytic applications across corporate intranets, extranets and the Web.

"Nothing is more critical to our success than understanding our customers, and Hyperion Essbase 6 is helping us drive tighter, more profitable relationships with them," said Steve Thomas, managing director, Revenue and Yield Management for Emery Worldwide, a global heavyweight cargo transportation company specializing in time-definite transportation services for business-to-business shippers. "We're using Hyperion Essbase 6 to analyze the service levels and pricing across all of our customers in 229 countries worldwide. The new attribute functionality gives us tremendous flexibility to group and analyze customers, shipments and rates. Furthermore, we have achieved more than a 40- fold increase in scalability using Hyperion Essbase 6. We can now analyze millions of individual shipments to customers around the globe."

"As the parent of a number of electric utilities and competitive businesses comprising Northeast Utilities, it is essential that we have an overall understanding of the company's financial performance," said Anthony Mallardi, application developer for the financial analysis group of Northeast Utilities, New England's largest electric utility system. "By leveraging the increased performance and scalability of Hyperion Essbase 6 on Sun Solaris, we are deploying a larger, more sophisticated application and still updating data within our very short overnight processing window. As a result, many executives, managers and financial analysts have desktop access to consistent, timely, actual and budget financial data to monitor financial performance across subsidiaries, business units, and products to support mission-critical decisions that affect our bottom-line."

Next-Generation Business Analysis Applications Emerge

Thousands of organizations already leverage Hyperion Essbase to deliver strategic business analysis applications that integrate data from ERP, CRM and e-Business systems, legacy systems and data warehouses. As organizations invest in operational systems in areas such as online shopping, salesforce automation, trading exchanges and call centers, they face the same challenge of integrating, unlocking and analyzing information to drive better decisions and fully realize the return on investment in these systems.

Hyperion Essbase 6 builds on the strengths of the market-leading enterprise OLAP server, to give customers critical insights across all areas of the business: - e-business - Global organizations must rapidly close the loop between e- marketing initiatives, Web presences, and e-commerce applications to understand and optimize the performance of their overall e-business initiatives.

Hyperion and partners such as AlphaBlox, DoubleClick, Engage, IBM and WebTrends will leverage Hyperion Essbase 6 to help companies transform the power of information locked in e-business systems into a competitive weapon.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - With an increasing focus on customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability, organizations are rapidly implementing new systems to manage customer touch-points such as call centers, sales organizations, Websites and retail stores. Hyperion Essbase 6 offers powerful new capabilities for customer-centric applications from Hyperion and Hyperion partners such as Analytical Solutions, Onyx Software and Recognition Systems.
• Performance Management - Strategy-focused organizations increasingly require sophisticated applications to guide performance and measure progress towards goals. Performance and activity management solutions from Hyperion and Hyperion partners can leverage Hyperion Essbase 6 to help customers improve execution and accountability, and stay focused on business objectives by transforming raw data into strategic business insights.
• Financial Management - Hyperion Essbase 6 offers customers and Hyperion partners, such as A3, Callidus Software, Comshare, Lawson Software and Walker, powerful new forecasting, statistical and profitability features to support a wide range of financial management applications. These capabilities support strategic planning; budgeting; management and financial reporting; compensation planning; and profitability analysis of customers, products, promotions, facilities and lines of business.
• Vertical Applications - Industry-specific analytic applications, such as defect analysis (manufacturing), patient-provider analysis (healthcare), customer churn (telecommunications), merchandise planning (retail) and portfolio analysis and risk assessment (financial, insurance), require the powerful, customizable analytic calculations in Hyperion Essbase 6. Hyperion partners such as i2 combine their in-depth industry expertise with Hyperion's robust business analysis platform to address unique business challenges across many vertical industries.
• Hosted Applications - Hyperion partners such as RER, a specialist in the energy and utilities industry, are extending their industry expertise to deliver vertical applications on Hyperion Essbase across extranets. These hosted B2B analytic applications deliver sophisticated, interactive analysis capabilities to large user communities at a very low deployment cost.

"A primary factor in the success of any e-business is the ability to leverage, analyze and share information," Jim Kelly, vice president of marketing, IBM Data Management Solutions. "By integrating the Hyperion Essbase OLAP technology into IBM's DB2 OLAP Server, we are providing our customers with the capability to perform scalable e-business information analysis to drive stronger customer and partner relationships, enhance their Web effectiveness and improve the profitability of product and service offerings."

Availability

Hyperion Essbase 6 is immediately available on HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, Compaq Alpha NT, Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows 95/98 platforms. Hyperion plans to begin beta testing for Hyperion Essbase on Linux in the second calendar quarter 2000. Showcase Corporation is integrating Hyperion Essbase 6 enhancements in Essbase/400, a native version of Hyperion Essbase optimized for the IBM AS/400 platform. IBM is delivering the Hyperion Essbase OLAP technology within IBM DB2 OLAP Server on IBM OS/390. More information on Hyperion Essbase 6 is available at www.hyperion.com.

About Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server

In use today by more than 3,000 companies, Hyperion Essbase OLAP Server is a strategic analytical platform optimized for enterprise management reporting, analysis and planning applications. It supports multi-user read/write access, large-scale data capacity, robust analytical calculations, rich attribute analyses, and sophisticated OLAP queries and delivers it all in a Web-centric architecture across multiple open hardware platforms. Hyperion Essbase provides intuitive multidimensional data navigation and consistent, rapid response times in network-centric computing environments. More than 350 Hyperion alliance partners, including Baan, IBM, Lawson Software, PeopleSoft, ShowCase and Walker, leverage Hyperion Essbase as a strategic enterprise OLAP platform for analytic applications. Additional information about Hyperion Essbase is available at www.hyperion.com/essbaseolap.cfm.

About Hyperion

A worldwide analytic application software leader, Hyperion Solutions Corporation gives today's knowledge workers the "freedom to succeed" with software, services and partner offerings that help them understand and optimize their businesses. More than 6,000 organizations worldwide use Hyperion's analytic application software products, which include market- leading packaged analytic applications, and OLAP server technology and tools. Hyperion's customers include more than 60 of the Fortune 100 and more than 40 of the Financial Times European Top 100 companies. In addition, more than 350 leading e-Business, data warehousing, OLAP tools, services, ERP, CRM, packaged application, and platform alliance partners extend the value of Hyperion's products and services to deliver maximum flexibility and choice to customers. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has offices in 26 countries. Information on Hyperion's products and services is available at www.hyperion.com, info@hyperion.com, or 1-800-286-8000.