The What and Why of Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase

What is Hyperion Essbase?
Hyperion Essbase is an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) multi-dimensional database server that extracts data from a wide range of data sources (Oracle Database 11g and other relational databases), files, and spread-sheets; calculates and aggregates this data; providing fast access to the results, using a dimensional model. For users with complex analytical requirements, Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase supports forecasting, variance analysis, root cause identification, scenario planning, cross-dimensional queries and aggregated data in real time. This provides companies with the necessary information in order to manage resources; identify target markets behaviours and demands; and forecast the success rate of future/on-going projects.

Engineered for scalability, security, and rapid-response, Oracle Essbase brings advanced analytics to the business user to enable greater understanding of the business, alignment of resources and improved business results. Oracle Essbase is the market leading OLAP server for enterprise performance management (EPM) applications and is made up of three components; illustrated in detail in figure 1.

Figure 1 (Three Tiers of Oracles Hyperion Essbase).

Why invest in Hyperion Essbase for your company?
Top 7 uses of Hyperion Essbase:

1. Hyperion Essbase: Using innovative, visual, easy-to-understand interfaces, Oracle Essbase can be populated through a wide variety of tools that allow it to access any commonly recognised data source; the data can then be combined into a single analytic view, so the entire enterprise can be consistently reported upon.
2. Speed-of-thought analysis for thousands of concurrent users: Aggregate data storage option (ASO) is optimized for massive sparse data sets, supporting thousands of concurrent business users performing sophisticated analyses at the speed of thought, thereby ensuring sub-second response times regardless of the complexity of the analytics.
3. Microsoft Office Integration: Hyperion Essbase has an add-in with Microsoft Office (Smartview) which allows users to forecast or budget in Microsoft Excel, an environment comfortable to most finance users, where data is automatically refreshed in real time.
4. Real-time analysis of key customer data, finances and spending, and product profitability facilitates an up-to-date understanding of customer segments and behaviour patterns.
5. Forecasting/scenario planning: Oracle Essbase enables business users to quickly model complex business scenarios. Block data storage option (BSO) enables driver-based scenario modeling, forecasting and predictive analytic applications.
6. Dimensional view of business: With Oracle Essbase, organisations define a dimensional view of their business and provide business users with new levels of self-sufficiency to access, navigate, and gain actionable insight into critical business issues.
7. A key strength of Oracle Essbase lies in its ability to allow users to ‘write back’ to an application’s data repository under security.

 ‘Efficiency is doing better what is already being done’ (Peter F. Drucker). Oracle Essbase succeed in doing this by leveraging Oracle’s Hyperion Foundation Services and Oracle Fusion Middleware to provide a common platform of services upon which companies can create, deploy, and manage EPM applications in one place.  Therefore, to ensure efficiency, decision making, forcasting and overall business success; an investment in Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase is the way forward.