Hyperion Applications Suite 4 Aims to Provide Business Performance Management In a BoxHyperion Applications Suite 4 Aims to Provide Business Performance Management In a Box

Hyperion announced the introduction of Hyperion Applications Suite 4 on April 11, calling it “the broadest, richest suite of performance management applications available.” Designed to make business performance management easy to use and deploy across the enterprise, the suite delivers a unified environment for enterprise planning, reporting and analysis, with seamless integration and navigation across applications. By enabling greater enterprise collaboration, the enhanced Hyperion applications help organizations to forecast and report with confidence, and achieve strategic alignment, financial control and regulatory compliance.

The announcement was made at Solutions 2005, Hyperion's global business performance management conference, which took place in New Orleans April 10-13.

"Hyperion Applications Suite 4 addresses the frustrations companies face in attempting to link management processes with spreadsheets and tools with differing interfaces, limited information sharing and lack of process flow," said Rich Clayton, vice president of product marketing for Hyperion. "Applications Suite 4 provides the common look and feel, common reporting and analysis tools, and a single point of maintenance and administration that decreases training costs, increases user adoption and promotes line manager participation. As a result of greater performance visibility, companies are able to fulfill the promise of business performance management through more informed decision-making, faster time to compliance and increased productivity -- all leading to breakthrough performance."

"Many companies have taken a single pain-point approach to business performance management such as planning, scorecarding or financial consolidations," said Lee Geishecker, research vice president with Gartner. "Moving forward, we recommend they evaluate the entire performance management framework and associated software components up front, even if companies start out deploying software for only a single management process. People need to realize that mixing and matching different software technologies could be a costly exercise requiring extensive integration."

"Enterprises no longer need to take a piecemeal approach to business performance management," added Clayton. "With a complete suite of easy-to-use applications, companies can rely on Hyperion Applications Suite 4 to achieve a higher return on investment and lower cost of ownership versus stand-alone point solutions."

According to research firm IDC, the market for financial/business performance management analytic applications is expected to increase from $1.2 billion in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2008. The July 2004 IDC market analysis report further states that, "companies serious about financial/BPM initiatives will see increasing value in a suite of products."

"The ease of use and new planning and reporting features of Applications Suite 4 will provide even greater visibility and predictability across our enterprise," said Dag Frigstad, system manager for Telenor ASA. "The enhancements to Hyperion Applications Suite 4 will allow us to engage more line managers in our planning and reporting processes, improve the quality of decision-making and increase our ability to meet corporate goals and objectives."