Oracle Enhances Performance Management Offerings
The new applications expand Oracle's business intelligence and enterprise performance management software line, which is already one of the vendor's hottest: Sales of BI and EPM applications grew 105 percent in fiscal 2008, said Oracle President Charles Phillips in a Web broadcast. "So we must be doing something right."
The new Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System expands on the Hyperion technology, including the Essbase online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, which now offers a wizard-driven design toolset called Essbase Studio for building, deploying and managing multidimensional analysis applications.
The system is also more tightly integrated with Oracle's BI tools, E-Business Suite applications and Fusion Middleware, the latter including Oracle's data integration, business process management and identity management software. Oracle has also developed a Calculation Manager tool for designing and centrally managing business rules across multiple planning and financial consolidation applications.
The Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management application, a new component of the EPM system, gives users visibility into the costs of business activities across an organization and helps identify opportunities for better managing resources and improving profitability.
The new and enhanced applications add predictive analysis capabilities to financial planning and budgeting processes that traditionally work with historical data, said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware.
The EPM products, now available for Windows Server platforms, are offered in on-premise and on-demand versions. Oracle's channel partners "play a significant role" in selling the company's EPM and BI software, said John Kopcke, senior vice president of Oracle's enterprise performance management global business unit. Kopcke, previously CTO of Hyperion, joined Oracle following the $3.3 billion acquisition in April 2007.