Siebel Analytics (OBIEE) Vs Hyperion Essbase

In this post I will discuss some of the major differences between OBIEE and Hyperion Essbase.
I have got the opportunity to work on Oracle BIEE formerly known as Siebel Analytics and Hyperion Essbase. Sometimes people come up with a question that which one is the best and what are the differences. I just want to share some views which you may ar may not agree. I would appreciate any comments.

1. From a broader prospective, I felt that Hyperion Essbase is a very comprehensive BI tool with very advance features to cater specific areas of an organisation. Essbase provide options like Block storage and aggregate storage options. Block storage options can be very effective for planning and budgeting applications and it also enablles to write back the data like budget data to essbase and do what-if analysis and save their versions. Even OBIEE allows you to write back but not useful for what-if type analysis.

Organisations keeping most of their planning and analysis data in MS Excel, would find it more useful than Siebel analytics. To load data from text files, load rule files can be created which holds the information about any transformation or cleaning operation done and same load rule file can be used for many loads.

Lets discuss on some more differences-

1. Hyperion Essbase is MOLAP where as OBIEE is ROLAP- MOLAP as we store the cube data, analysis is much faster than ROLAP where data is not stored anywhere and queried directly from the source database. But when you are storing an Essbase cube you can analyse data only upto the time it was created( we call it near real time analysis) where as OBIEE gives you the 100% real time analysis. Now this all depends on the needs of an Organisation.Hyperion Essbase also provides XOLAP or hybrid OLAP where Summary level data resides in Essbase cube but detail data is retreived fom the source database. Also to load the data in the cubes or refresh the cube with fresh data, it takes some time and resource.

2. Hyperion Essbase requires a relational database to store metadata where as OBIEE does not. So you can save a lot on this.

3. Hyperion essbase use Microsoft Excel as analysis tool- This is one feature where Hyperion scores over OBIEE. Its not that OBIEE does not have integration with Excel but the way you do it in Hyperion is amazing. OBIEE only allows you to open the charts you have created in Excel or powerpoint and analyse but Hyperion places the entire cube in front of you in excel and you can drill down, add or remove dimensions, apply filters, pivot data, slice and dice and much more and also the write back capability which makes it the first choice for budgeting and forecasting applications. This is very important from implementation perspective as most of the users are already working on excel and they do not even think twice of acceping the system I mean users adaptibiliy is high and fast as compared to any other system which generally take atleast 15 days to learn and 1 month to understand and atleast 2 months to get fully used to the system and 3 months to accept the system. So a very big factor interms of a project being successful. Also, saves a lot of cost on training.

4. Pre built applications available for OBIEE- Oracle has created pre-built schemas, reports and dashboards for some major ERP's like SAP, Oracle Apps, JD Edwards, peoplesoft etc. Those warehouse pre-built schemas can be used by Hyperion but only to some extent and as the dashboards are created in OBIEE, Hyperion cannot use it. This is the scenario as of now but soon they will be available for Hyperion as well.

5. Very easy for end users to design dashboards in OBIEE. If you need a system only for your BI and reporting needs, OBIEE will be a good value proposition.

6. Advance analytics, what-if's, predictive modelling and very fast infact lightening fast system Hyperion Essbase would be effective.