First let me say it isn't my idea, but management has asked me to work with the Hyperion Essbase sales guy to research their BI solution and compare it with WebFocus as a possible replacement. So I'm asking all of you if any of you have any information or experience with Hyperion (Essbase) BI solutions. I'd like to hear good and bad in order to not sound completely biased towards WebFocus.

Thanks so much.

there's a paper comparing them all, somewhere on the ibi site...some recent research group paper.
what focus has that nothing else has is FML and kick-butt excel integration. From a developer's perspective, the language is sine-qua-non, and from an architect's perpective the native db format is sine-qua-non. Still, an Oracle dba can slap an index on an oracle file a lot easier than a focus dba can.

Once again thanks susannah...... I'll look on the ibi site for the paper......

Well, Hyperion is the 500 pound gorilla in the cube space, but their tool is expensive, and is generally an overkill. It will take months to get it right, and then periodic updates will become an issue.

Have a look at a simpler cube technology called Q4bis. They are small, but have an impressive list of clients. They build a cube structure in a matter of a day or so, and their front end is superb. The technology is essentially the new MSSQL Server, and the performance is tops, with multi million row fact tables. So, unless you are looking to have hundreds of millions of rows in your fact table in the cube, you are wasting your money on Hyperion.

Though I didn't work on our Hyperion Essbase project, we got rid of it after 2 years and replaced it with WebFOCUS. Very expensive, very slow and always breaking and hard to support.

Good Luck!

Just curious where is this group research paper, can someone thow a link out there? Any feed back you have on the two different BI solutions would be great. Thank you

quote:

Originally posted by LostinLife:
[qb] Just curious where is this group research paper, can someone thow a link out there? Any feed back you have on the two different BI solutions would be great. Thank you

[/qb]

I believe the paper Susannah is referring to is the Forrester research report on BI solutions. They include their "Wave" (similar to Gartner's Magic Quadrant, but formatted differently) which includes their ratings of different BI vendors in different functional areas. In terms of their opinion of Hyperion vs. Information Builders, the only category in which Hyperion is on par with WebFOCUS is in Analytical Reporting.

In the other 3 categories (Enterprise Reporting, Business Reporting, Consolidated Platform Reporting), Information Builders is ranked significantly higher than Hyperion. In fact, as a composite score among all 13 vendors reviewed, Information Builders seems to have the highest overall rating for the 4 categories of BI.

We bought the reprint rights to the study so feel free to view it here (and I'm including a direct link so you can bypass the form):

http://www.informationbuilders.com/tracker?src=focalpoi...4ForresterBIWave.pdf

You can also buy the report directly from Forrester if you prefer:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,34747,00.html

Hope that helps.

-Chris

Thank you, this information helps a great deal.