Hyperion Solutions Corp, the analytical applications provider, has added web traffic analysis applications to its e-business offering through partnerships with NetGravity Inc, DoubleClick Inc, net.Genesis and DataSage Inc.
The applications, which cover analysis of consumer websurfing, net advertising and marketing, will run on Hyperion’s Essbase 6.0 application server launched last month. The company says that the new version was developed with e-commerce in mind, with improved ability to categorize ‘attributes’ together with more descriptive, non-numeric elements such as product information in a relational database.
Hyperion’s director of EMEA product marketing Ian Macdonald said he sees little danger from the competition (Microsoft, Oracle and Microstrategy) because they operate in different sectors of the market. Microsoft’s entry into the OLAP market has been much-hyped over the last year. We’re still waiting. We’ve not seen a dramatic impact, he said.
Macdonald admitted that Sunnyvale, California-based Hyperion has had to compete against SQL Server at the low end of the market, but as most of Hyperion’s business is high-end, it hasn’t made significant difference, he claimed. Oracle Express, he said, was less scalable, while Microstrategy’s software, though fractionally more scalable, didn’t function as effectively in more sophisticated calculations. Hyperion will launch its Allocations Manager module, which deals with exactly this type of analysis, next month. Allocations Manager runs multi-dimensional analytics, working out which high-selling products to sell to the most valuable customers.
