How Oracle Hyperion Essbase can enhance your Business

The latest version of Oracle Hyperion Essbase is one of the most powerful Business Intelligence (BI) tools on the market. While traditionally looked at by many as a finance only tool, it has become obvious to any analyst that Essbase can provide a remarkable service of high level dissection of data in both high and lower data quantity environments.

Hyperion Essbase is one of the first OLAP tools on the market. In 2005 “Information Age” magazine called Essbase one of the ten most influential technology innovations of the previous ten years, putting it alongside the Pentium processor from Intel and Linux.

How can Essbase enhance your business?

Hyperion Essbase can sit at the heart of a BI suite, or even on the periphery of the BI infrastructure. You can use it for detailed financial planning where users can write and retrieve from one source, or it can gather large amounts of detailed information from a datawarehouse and aggregate it up to higher levels to provide summary analysis. When a deeper dive of the data is required, it’s available to you at the speed of thought.

A lot of BI tools and software sit atop a datawarehouse and require complex configuration and data manipulation to get their schemas working for the user. However Essbase is its own data-store. If your datawarehouse is running slowly or is down altogether; Essbase is operating due to its own data store providing users with uninterrupted service.

Essbase can also accept all forms of data and information. You can load anything from Excel formatted sheets into an Essbase database to the noble CSV file. You can plug directly into a database to export data into an Essbase cube, or manually run the data in it yourself. This means there is no area of the business that produces data which is off limits to Essbase. If you can find the data, you can load it to and analyse it on Essbase.

Uses include everything from the Financial planning of one of Ireland’s largest companies, payroll analysis and reporting for a large bank, to the high level analysis of an airline’s complex route network.

Essbase can also be used as an engine to drive your existing BI infrastructure. Is your OBIEE or Micro-strategy suite running slow? Perhaps Essbase cubes at the heart of the suite will do the heavy lifting, to let the analytic server service the data warehouse for detailed queries.

Hyperion Essbase is a tool that will take any form of data, integrate with other BI tools, provide you with the capability to plan your finances for the next 5 years, perform data analysis on everything from sales data to website analytics, stay up and running even when your datawarehouse is down, work at the speed of thought and all available to you through Smartview natively inside MS Excel, Powerpoint, Word and Outlook.

If there is a business Essbase can’t enhance, it hasn’t been thought of yet.