SAS, Hyperion Broaden BI Enterprise Reach

SAS Institute Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. will announce products designed to extend their business intelligence reach within the enterprise at their respective user conferences this week.

SAS, of Cary, N.C., will announce at the SUGI (SAS Users Group International) conference in Philadelphia an updated version of its Enterprise BI Server. Hyperion, of Santa Clara, Calif., will unveil at its Solutions conference in New Orleans several new modules for its Hyperion Applications Suite.

In the current release of Enterprise BI Server, SAS continues with its “BI for the masses” strategy, adding SAS OLAP Server for creating online analytical processing cubes and multidimensional data reports.

The new Enterprise BI Server also adds integrated geographic visualization capabilities, through a partnership with Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc.s ArcGIS Server, and integrated job scheduling, through a partnership with Platform Computing Inc.s JobScheduler.

Enterprise BI Server offers reporting, query and analysis, OLAP, predictive analytics, visualization, and integration with Microsoft Corp.s Office, all with shared metadata. SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said the company wants to provide a complete BI solution to other vendors for query and reporting tools. SAS Web Report Studio, part of Enterprise BI Server, is a key part of that effort.

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“We have spent the last five years working on this new Web Report Studio,” Goodnight said. “The new Release 2.1, we feel, will now go head-to-head … against any of the low-end vendors.”

“We evaluated six different solutions before we acquired SAS,” said Jody Porrazzo, director of econometrics risk strategies at Apex Management Group Inc., in Princeton, N.J. “If youre going to do simple summaries and slice and dice and just need graphics, the other products are fine, but we need more than that.”

Hyperion is also providing a common user experience across its Applications Suite 4 and is adding several new modules to the product. Chief among them is Workforce Planning, for managing head count, administering salary and compensation adjustments, and calculating payroll taxes and benefits.

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