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.

Learn Qlikview

I have posted a tutorial for how to create quick dashboard in Qlikview at
Manohar Rana: Getting Started with Qlikview

You amy also like to read detailed comparison of Qlikview with others tools at

Qlikview Vs Others

You can also refer to the complete tutorial provided by Qliktech at

Qliktech Tutorial

Business Intelligence Will Decline

Gartner Says Strong Growth in Business Intelligence Will Decline as Market Flux Continues

Analysts Discuss Shifting Business Intelligence Landscape at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, 5-7 February 2008

Egham, UK, January 10, 2008 — The days of strong double-digit growth in the business intelligence (BI) market are over as the industry enters a state of flux following vendor consolidation, increasing maturity and price erosion, said Gartner. However, BI remains mission critical for businesses as it turns information into an asset for deriving insight and making decisions. Gartner advised end users to make BI pervasive to business users by making it user-friendly, collaborative and process-driven.

Speaking ahead of the Gartner BI Summit, held from 5-7 February in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gartner analysts said worldwide growth rates in 2007 are expected to be slightly lower than the previous year, at 12.5 per cent, and will move into single-digits beyond $7 billion by 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6 per cent.

Following consolidation among BI vendors, Gartner added that value to users can also increase as a result of mergers and acquisitions in the market. “Consolidation activities by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft should help accelerate the value derived from BI,” said Gartner senior research analyst and presenter at the Gartner BI Summit, Dan Sommer. “Large vendors will drive increased usage, while new BI vendors will emerge introducing innovative technology and products to demonstrate differentiation and fill the gaps in "mega-vendors'" product lines.”

Competitive edge
Mr Sommer added that increased BI innovation also means that query, reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities have reached parity and no longer deliver competitive edge. Most vendors now include these basic BI capabilities in their product stacks, including Microsoft which added more BI functionalities in SQL Server 2005, Office 2007 and PerformancePoint Server. Remaining pure-play vendors can recruit application vendors (not SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) of their BI platform to provide analytical applications, or leverage relationships with value-added resellers (VARs) for domain-specific solutions.

Successful pure-play BI vendors will incorporate emerging areas in BI such as dashboards, predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive visualisation techniques and in-memory analytics. Hosted BI through software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one new approach being pioneered by a cluster of vendors including Seatab and LucidEra. They can also continue thriving by specialising by industry or geographic region. In addition, smaller and midsize organisations are becoming an important target market for BI vendors, with a large proportion being new opportunities.

Mega-vendor dominatio
The acquisitions by Oracle (Hyperion), SAP (Business Objects, still pending) and IBM (Cognos, still pending) in 2007 were disrupters for the market, which, if they are finalised, will eliminate all larger publicly traded BI companies. Overall, more than two-thirds of the current BI market is now attributed to the mega-vendors. The remaining BI powerhouse vendors SAS, Microstrategy, Information Builders, and more so, smaller BI vendors, such as Arcplan, Panorama, or Qliktech, will need to increase market push to stay visible above the increased noise from the “big four.”

North America, Western Europe and Japan are the most-significant regions in terms of BI spending and will still account for five-sixths of software revenue by 2011. However, "greenfield" opportunities, together with fast economic and structural developments, will fuel double-digit growth in Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.

End users
Gartner advises end users of BI solutions from vendors that have been recently acquired to hold strategic investments until a product roadmap has been clearly presented from the vendor. While there is no doubt that the acquired core products, such as Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase, Business Objects XI, or Cognos 8 will remain highly strategic and supported by extensive research and development funding, overlapping products in a vendor’s portfolio may see some defocus in the mid-term.

For more information on the Gartner BI Summit and to register for the event, please visit europe.gartner.com/bi.