Business Objects, Hyperion Push Next-Gen Business Intelligence

First out the gate: Business Objects, of San Jose, Calif., with news of BusinessObjects XI Release 2. Despite the Release 2 moniker, the new version offers major advancements over the first version of BusinessObjects XI, now 10 months old, said Lance Walter, vice president of corporate product marketing. “XI is the biggest selling release in our history, and we decided to call it Release 2, meaning that it&s still being built on that platform,” Walter said.

Probably the most important new functionality in Release 2 is the so-called Intelligent Question feature. With it, users simply pull down a series of menus to express a question. As an example, a user could ask for the top five customers by quarter, then probe deeper to ask for the top five customers by net sales by region. “We think it&s a radical simplification of the business intelligence query interface,” Walter said.

Business Objects competitor Hyperion, of Santa Clara, Calif., this month renovated its flagship product. With Hyperion System 9, partners and customers now have single server deployment for Hyperion&s financial planning and consolidation capabilities, as well business intelligence analysis, reporting and scorecards. In addition, the software now offers a new roles-based workspace that serves up the capabilities pertinent to each user&s job. “That can be presented through a thin client, over a browser, or delivered through Microsoft Office, which also can be through the Internet if you want it to be,” said John Kopcke, Hyperion CTO.

A new Master Data Management capability allows partners to manage data across the entire enterprise.

Such capabilities, along with the software&s zero footprint, enable Hyperion partner Pinnacle Group Worldwide to offer performance management as a hosted service. “We think we can really address the concerns of the midmarket, which typically lack a BI infrastructure,” said Andrew Jorgensen, senior partner of the New York management consultancy and integrator.