New Hyperion suite makes dashboards easier to use, deploy and personalise

Hyperion has released a new generation of software that makes dashboards easier to use, deploy and personalise. Hyperion Performance Suite version 8.2 builds upon the software`s strengths in query and analysis, enterprise reporting and dashboarding.

It delivers enhancements that reduce dashboard design and deployment time, and empowers users with easy to use reporting and dashboarding functionality.

"Dashboards are the shop windows to an overall corporate performance management strategy. They make the results of the planning and control cycle visible. However, they need a strong business intelligence basis for additional analysis," says Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president at Gartner.

Marc Scheepbouwer, CEO of local Hyperion distributor, Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI), the business intelligence subsidiary of JSE Securities Exchange-listed Global Technology, says the new Hyperion Performance Suite delivers an integrated set of dashboarding and reporting tools.

"This enables customers to quickly and easily extract business intelligence from any data source and broadly distribute it to employees, customers and partners in a visual and graphical view."

Hyperion Performance Suite is currently being used in multiple departments, such as human resources, marketing, sales and manufacturing for analysing complex information in an easy to understand, graphical view.

The Hyperion Performance Suite now delivers new capabilities to help extend dashboard use throughout the organisation, including:

* Easy-to-use dashboard creation tools, giving customers the flexibility to create both detailed and analytic dashboards for executives, customisable dashboards for employees, and intuitive dashboards for the extended organisation;

* New drag-and-drop data modelling, data query and personalised dashboard development functionality enables users to create personalised, relevant content in their dashboard view;

* Tighter integration within the Performance Suite provides users with the ability to publish company and ad hoc end-user reports in an easy to consume view for a broad range of people throughout the organisation;

* Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers customers an open standards, lower total cost of ownership business intelligence solution that delivers improved reliability, scalability and flexibility;

* Support for Web services delivers easier integration with corporate portals and the customisation of access to business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) information; and

* New view manager enables managers to update dashboards with specific content such as new metrics for tracking performance, and push the dashboard view out to workgroups.

Mike Burkes, data technology manager for Toyota Motor Sales USA, says: "Toyota Motor Sales is testing Hyperion Performance Suite 8.2 for several business units, including one that processes all our vehicle orders.

"After eight weeks of extensive testing against the previous version baselines, we have quantified that 85% of our reports are running an average of 40% faster, with some as high as 80% faster. With this latest release, which gives us the capability to run reports on the server with a true zero client footprint to the end user, our network load is reduced.

"This directly translates into savings in infrastructure and support costs and significantly improves deployment across the WAN. This configuration will scale easily as our user population increases, and it will provide us with the added benefit of failover protection.

"We have successfully integrated the new version with our hybrid security authentication system to facilitate single sign-on and allow access to be managed across the enterprise. Bottom line, with the new Hyperion Performance Suite, we`re expecting gains in scalability, failover management, reporting speed, and user accessibility - all of which will decrease our costs and result in a higher return on investment."

Scheepbouwer says: "Providing powerful dashboards, the Hyperion Performance Suite enables the appropriate query, reporting and understanding of business information, and enables employees to make optimal decisions that drive bottom line results, reduce costs and increase shareholder value."

Note: GBI invites all ex-Brio users, and other interested parties, to a breakfast seminar on 7 April 2004. The latest features and benefits of both Hyperion Intelligence and Hyperion SQR will be covered at the seminar. For more information, contact Beverley Nikitaridis on 011 319 9800 or e-mail bnikitaridis@glotec.co.za. (Please note that seating is limited.)