Hyperion to Add Analysis for Siebels Integration Offering

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Hyperion Solutions Corp. is planning to support Siebel Systems Inc.s Universal Application Network integration platform, which should give a boost to enterprises looking to add real-time decision making to their CRM systems.

Hyperion is the first business intelligence vendor to pledge support for UAN, which shipped in October with Release 7.5 of Siebels namesake customer relationship management platform; more BI vendors are expected to follow. UAN uses Web services to connect Siebel applications with other business applications, providing a semantic layer to translate business processes between applications.

Hyperion Chief Technology Officer John Kopcke, in Sunnyvale, Calif., last week told eWeek that Hyperions support for UAN will ensure that analytic processes, as well as business processes, translate between disparate applications. “UAN is focused on how to process an order better, but we see steps within how to process an order better where having to make the required business decisions kicks off a different set of processes,” Kopcke said. “Thats where Hyperion plays, in the analytical processes within the business processes.”

Siebel software user Bill Geronimo, director of CRM application development at Pitney Bowes Inc., said Hyperions support for UAN will enable real-time analysis of data bundled with business process workflows.

“The analysis would happen as part of the business process,” said Geronimo, in Stamford, Conn. “If we want to cross-sell to customers, we have to go into the legacy system, bring data into Siebel and analyze it online. This would allow us to implement the analysis as part of the workflow.”

Geronimo said such real-time analysis would be especially useful in sales and marketing applications, such as cross-selling—offering customers products related to the ones theyve bought or expressed interest in.

“The key thing in sales and marketing is to be able to make those decisions on the fly,” Geronimo said.

Pitney Bowes is upgrading to Siebel 7.5. The company, which sells mailing systems and related products and services, already uses analytic software from Hyperion, Cognos Inc. and Business Objects S.A. as well as Siebels own nQuire analytic application.

Kopcke said Hyperion will support UAN once the platform is mature, saying the existing version is little more than a demonstration. Geronimo concurred with this assessment but said he expects UAN to be mature by the time Pitney Bowes is ready to use it, still more than a year away. “Im confident that by the time I need it, itll be ready for us, with workflows specific to our business built into it,” Geronimo said.

Siebel officials did not respond by press time to inquiries about the impact of BI vendors support for UAN. But the San Mateo, Calif., company will extend its analytic offerings when it announces this week the inclusion of budgeting and forecasting applications from Comshare Inc. in the Siebel ERM (Employee Relationship Management) application. Comshares Management Planning and Control analytic applications will be accessible through Siebel ERMs portal interface, providing human resources staff functions such as analysis of labor costs and project allocation costs, according to Comshare officials in Ann Arbor, Mich.