Hyperion Solutions Corp. is offering a new release of its business-performance-management line of applications that includes software it acquired last year from its buyout of Brio Software Inc.

The Brio software adds query, reporting, and alerting capabilities that were lacking in earlier versions of the Hyperion Performance Suite. The upgrade also uses Brio technologies to make it easier to deploy and personalize dashboard interfaces for performance-management tasks that can be distributed to a broad range of users within a company.

Longtime Brio customer Ripley Maddock, customer-management director at Canadian utility company Direct Energy, says he was concerned about the fate of Brio's software after Hyperion bought it. But the only notable change, he says, is positive: improved customer support. Still, although the merger of Hyperion and Brio technologies seems a "natural fit," Maddock says he has no immediate plans to upgrade to the new release because of other IT priorities. Direct Energy implemented Brio Intelligence five years ago to put dashboards on the desktop computers of some 300 employees. The dashboards display a range of operational performance metrics, such as average revenue per service call and the average number of repeat service visits needed to complete a job.

Hyperion also has upgraded its Essbase online-analytical-processing server with forecasting and predictive analytics features. The features available in Essbase can be used in conjunction with Hyperion's performance-management applications to forecast sales and spending trends, for example, and alert managers when the two aren't aligned.