A new release of the Hyperion Essbase analytic engine provides companies with a single platform for financial- and operational-data analysis, says Hyperion Solutions Inc. The vendor debuted Hyperion Essbase 7X Monday, along with a customer-profitability-management application and software for linking Essbase with data in SAP Business Information Warehouse.

Essbase 7X uses aggregate-storage technology to speed up calculations by as much as 100 times the speed of previous versions. Aggregate-storage compresses sparse data sets by a factor of 20, which increases calculation speed and improves scalability, the company says. Also new to Essbase is Hyperion Visual Explorer, an optional graphical tool for viewing and querying data.

Essbase 7X's enhanced speed and scalability combined with the visualization software makes it easier for companies to deploy Essbase to large numbers of users for financial-analysis tasks, such as budget planning and forecasting, and analyzing operational data, such as customer-profitability and supply-chain-performance information.

The new technology should reduce deployment costs and reduce or eliminate the need to use third-party technology for analyzing sparse data sets, says Mike Schiff, Current Analysis analyst. Essbase 7X also will mitigate the perception that Hyperion has ignored Essbase in favor of its analytical apps, he says.

The Profitability Management package includes Essbase, Hyperion Business Modeling, and Hyperion Performance Suite as well as report and chart templates, pre-built dashboards, methodologies and metrics, and services for measuring and analyzing customer profitability. It can identify profitable customers, for example, and calculate the cost of acquiring customers and their margin contributions.

The Hyperion Data Integration Connector for SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) connects SAP BW data sources to analytical applications built on Essbase. SAP BW is the business-intelligence and data-warehousing component of SAP NetWeaver. The adapter software, part of Essbase Integration Services, uses the OLE DB for OLAP interface and was jointly developed with Simba Technologies Inc.

Pricing for Essbase 7X starts at $10,000 with additional user fees. The Visual Explorer and Integration Connector for SAP BW are priced according to configuration. All are available immediately.