Hyperion Solutions Corp, child of the merger between Hyperion Software and Arbor Software Corp (CI No 3,481), has announced the immediate availability of Web Gateway 2.0. This enterprise platform is designed to help organizations deploy web-based analytic applications. It comes at a particularly interesting moment in the history of online analytical processing, or OLAP. Arbor never made any secret of its ambition to tackle Oracle Corp’s analysis business head-on. Adding Hyperion’s financial applications, which include budgeting, planning and forecasting, lent that ambition credibility. If there was one element missing, it was the internet. This release of Web Gateway 2.0 brings Arbor’s 18-month-old ESSBase Web Gateway up to date with Hyperion’s arsenal of analysis and reporting tools to back it up. Version 2.0 lets users add multimedia, including text, graphics, audio and video, to any type of data. Also in 2.0, people can save their own analysis of a given data set-up to a shared repository – a server – where others can look at it and add their own insights. All this happens in real time, with numbers updated for all users as fresh data is being fed in. It adds up to a cost-effective way to liberate analysis from the desktops of the privileged few according to VP of product marketing Dan Druker. Our customers are putting information into the hands of field sales reps, line managers and planners, who are then able to push decisions right out to the people that are actually operating the company. With the browser providing a universal front end, the company claims training costs are much lower than for comparable systems. Besides, Web Gateway 2.0 is priced at $10,000 for unlimited users, so the more users who get access to the data, the more cost-effective any given implementation will be. Providing browser-based access to database-driven reporting and analysis applications is precisely the business that Oracle wants to be in today. With this upgrade to its web platform, and maybe for the first time, Hyperion is beginning to look like a serious challenger to the database giant’s OLAP hegemony.
