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Business performance management software developer Hyperion Solutions Corp. this week will announce System 9, the next progression of its software that integrates financial management applications with a business intelligence platform.
The new suite is a step toward what Hyperion defines as a BPM system, one that brings together the data housed in financial systems with BI functionality—and broadens the reach of BI across an organization, according to John Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion.
To better facilitate the integration of financials and BI, System 9 provides an underlying metadata management capability that enables users to manage not only data in Hyperions system but data from others as well.
“Master Data Management is one of the distinguishing features of System 9 that lets [users] manage the same master data in Hyperion with all other ERP [enterprise resource planning] and transactional systems,” said Kopcke in Santa Clara, Calif. “So if we want to launch a new product, there are a lot of systems across Hyperion we need to upgrade—some in BPM, and some in our Oracle financials ERP system. With MDM, we can manage the introduction of a new product centrally across all systems.”
Gebhard Rainer, vice president of finance in the Hotel Finance and Technology division at Hyatt International Corp., is beta testing System 9 with the goal of expanding from Hyperions current financial management and reporting tools to the BI realm.
“The primary objective we want to use [MDM] for is … a unified approach to collecting data,” said Rainer in Chicago. “We are using Hyperion as an overlay over Oracle [Corp.] and many other applications we have. We have consolidated a number of previously independent companies. All of these companies brought their own systems, own structures, their own way of doing business, into the parent company. We had to find a quick solution to allow us to consolidate financials.”
Hyperions System 9, available now, is based on work the company did around its Foundation Services layer, which has enabled different functions of financial management and BI—production reporting, analytics, financial reporting, score-carding and modeling—to be available in a single work space.
“What is extremely new here is the concept of work space,” said Hyperions Kopcke. “So instead of an individual firing up a bunch of software products and trying to figure out how their role is used across tools, we take someone into a [roles-defined] work space.”
While the roles themselves are defined by the company using the system, customization comes in the form of defining the databases and reports each role would run against, according to Kopcke.
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