Hyperion solutions talks performance and accountability. (BI News Review).

Breakthrough performance and accountability are the two major themes at Hyperion Solutions Corp's annual user conference, which kicked off this week at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the opening general session of Solutions 2003, a 3,000-strong audience, comprising customers, partners and selected analysts/media, heard CEO Jeff Rodek articulate Hyperion's vision of creating "performance accountable organizations" by driving participation, strategic alignment, and accountability across the enterprise.

"Our goal is to help companies better manage performance across the entire organization while bringing corporate accountability to the individual level," said Rodek.

Hyperion even rolled out its own CFO, David Odell, to highlight the personal accountability concerns facing the modern-day CFO. "There's a 360-degree of pressure on CFOs today," Odell said, identifying three key common themes in the market, integrity, insight and profitable growth, as being foremost in the minds of financial executives today.

CEO Rodek also outlined four key tenets of a performance accountable enterprise--translating strategy into action; performance monitoring; compliance; and dynamic planning--which he said pointed to a new category of BI software called business performance management (BPM).

Hyperion, which has a strong core competency in business intelligence (BI) tools and financially-oriented analytic applications, has over the past three years built up a comprehensive BPM suite comprising of an integrated set of applications covering financial consolidation, management, planning, budgeting, reporting and scorecarding. All of these application components are underpinned by a market-leading analytic engine called Essbase XTD.

Other Hyperion executives spoke of pushing performance management beyond the traditionally narrow confines of the finance department and into other parts of the enterprise.

"Last year we described a vision of BPM that was built on principles such as financial accountability, collaboration, and linking strategy with execution", said Nazhin Zarghamee, chief marketing officer at Hyperion. "But financial plans are only as valuable as they are accurate, and they are only accurate if there is participation by all internal stakeholders in the enterprise".

Hyperion also made several new product announcements that Rodek said underscored Hyperion's leading role in the BPM software category. First, it announced that its Financial Management system now provides out-of-the-box support for key elements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance, including CEO and CFO certification, internal control reporting, US auditing standards, and accelerated reporting cycles. Hyperion has partnered with BearingPoint Inc (formerly KPMG Consulting Inc) to build-in the compliance.

Hyperion also took the wraps off its third-generation Performance Scorecard, which links business strategy with actionable goals. Enhancements include improved dashboard integration, bi-directional feedback, better navigation and workflow interfaces, and tighter integration with the Essbase XTD multidimensional engine.

Hyperion officials said that the next big release of Essbase XTD (version 7) is on track for a general availability by the end of the year. Zarghamee said that customers can expect a wealth of new functionality including metadata sharing, predictive data mining capabilities, and support for real-time event analysis.

Hyperion continued to demonstrate its leading role in the development of standards by announcing support for the new XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) Web-based specification, which is designed to improve the speed and accuracy of financial reporting.

Hyperion officials expect the XML-based standard to become a key feature of Hyperion's financial reporting and compliance solutions later this year--when version three of the specification is expected to be finalized.

Hyperion's three-year participation in the XBRL consortium builds on a strong heritage of driving open standards in the BI industry. It was a founding member of the OLAP Council and, more recently, a founding member of the XML for Analysis (XMLA) and Java OLAP Interface (JOLAP) working groups.

Looking to the future, Godfrey Sullivan, Hyperion's President and COO, outlined the main focus for 2003: "The key themes for us this year will be interoperability between our suite components, scalability, better administrative interfaces, and enhanced customer support".

Sullivan also said the company aims to rectify what he acknowledged was a somewhat haphazard release strategy. "People have been telling us that we're releasing products too quickly...we're now moving from rapid releases to a much more synchronized approach". Sullivan expects consistent version line-up across the Hyperion product suite by the end of the year.

Hyperion also chose the event to launch an extended EMEA partner program to increase sales opportunities for its BPM suite, and showcased several new partnerships for BPM. For example, Teradata, the data warehousing division of NCR Corp, has inked an agreement to link its financial management solution--comprised of the Teradata enterprise data warehouse and domain-specific logical data models--to Hyperion's Essbase XTD platform.

Teradata will also resell the Essbase XTD platform. Additionally, both companies also plan to develop Teradata Financial Analytic Accelerators, which are reporting and analysis tools built on Hyperion Essbase XTD, to access integrated and detailed financial data within the Teradata warehouse.

Judging by the upbeat mood at the show Hyperion certainly seems to have turned a corner in 2003 after several shaky years recovering from an ill-executed merger with Arbor Software and a string of poor results. The company's strong commitment towards being a BPM leader certainly seems to be hitting the right chord among customers and investors alike. Importantly, Hyperion's strategy is very much in tune with the current business concerns pressing CEOs and CFOs today.