News

Hyperion Introduces Essbase 6.0

• By Scott Bekker
• 03/28/2000

Hyperion (www.hyperion.com), which merged with Arbor Software, makers of the Essbase OLAP engine, in 1998, was initially expected by analysts to be a giant capable of competition with the likes of Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com). Essbase 5.0.2 was released a year ago, in March 1999, and introduced advanced new features. After version 5.0.2, however, analysts began to put a negative spin on Hyperion and its union with Arbor. While Hyperion released a beta of Essbase 6.0 in August 1999, nothing has been seen since.

Despite the management shakeups and downturn in industry confidence in Hyperion, the 1999 OLAP Report (www.olapreport.com) found that Essbase retained the top spot in OLAP server market share.

Essbase 6.0 includes several new capabilities for industrial-strength OLAP for business analysis. Expanded attribute analysis lets users associate additional text, numeric, and date information, or "attributes," with the data elements in their analytic applications built on Essbase 6.0. This expands analytical capabilities across descriptive categories such as demographic segments, product types, or online behavior characteristics. In addition, Essbase 6.0 will provide support for sophisticated business calculations.

Essbase 6.0 will also support multi-user read/write access, large-scale data capacity, robust analytical calculations, rich attribute analyses, and sophisticated OLAP queries, all delivered in a Web-based architecture across multiple open hardware platforms.

Essbase 6.0 is currently available for HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, Compaq Alpha NT, Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows 95/98. - Isaac Slepner