Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence 2008

Gartner's Magic Quadrant is an easy way of knowing the various tools with their capabilities, shortcomings and market position.
Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence 2008

Hyperion Licensing Information

for hyperion essbase pricing policy, you can refer to the Oracle Price List
This document is for general purpose.
My main motto behind writing this post is to throw some light on types of licensing policies of softwares.
Before some time there was lot of confusion about the types of licenses. Let me explain them.
1. Named User License:
A named user license allows the software to be used by one specific user named when you purchase the software. Named user licenses may be installed on multiple computers but they may only be accessed by the named user, they may not be shared in any way. A named user license may not be used at the same time on different computers.
It can also be defined as an individual authorized by you to use the programs which are installed on a single server or multiple servers, regardless of whether the individual is actively using the programs at any given time. A non human operated device will be counted as a named user plus in addition to all individuals authorized to use the programs, if such devices can access the programs.
2. Concurrent user license or Floating user license:
A floating user license, sometimes known as a concurrent user license, allows the software to be used by more than one user at the same site but limits the number of simultaneous users to the number of licenses purchased.
For example, three floating user licenses permit three users to access the software at the same time. A fourth user must wait until one of the current users exits the software before they may use the software. A floating user license is sometimes called a concurrent or shared license. Floating user licenses should be purchased for any installation where multiple users may access the software on the same computer such as a build server.
3. Processor based license:
This is defined as the number or procesors where the software is installed and running. The number of cores and core processor licensing factor which generally ranges from 0.25 to 0.75 also decides the number of processors to be considered for licensing.
For example, an XYZ server installed and/or running the program on 6 cores and having core processor licensing factor of .25 would require 2 processor licenses (6 multiplied by a core processor licensing factor of .25 equals 1.50 which is then rounded up to the next whole number which is 2).
There are some other types of licensing terms but only these are used mostly.

Hyperion Reporting and Analysis Architecture

Lets understand the various components of Hyperion:
Workspace is a common window to view the contents of all Hyperion components.
Hyperion Reporting and Analysis:

One zero-footprint Web-based thin client provides users with access to content:

● Financial reporting for scheduled or on-demand highly formatted financial and operational reporting from most data sources including Hyperion Planning – System 9 and Hyperion Financial Management – System 9

● Interactive reporting for ad hoc relational queries, self-service reporting and dashboards against ODBC data sources

● SQR Production reporting for high volume enterprise-wide production reporting.

● Web analysis for interactive ad hoc analysis, presentation, and reporting of multidimensional data.

Hyperion Reporting and Analysis Architecture:(This diagram is taken from some Hyperion Document)

Client: The client tools consist of
Workspace: It is a DHTML Zero footprint web client and provide the user interface for viewing and interacting with the reports created using Authoring studios.
Authoring Studios: These are the client interfaces to create the reports and includes-
(a) Hyperion Interactive Reporting Studio: Windows client where you can connect to different data sources including the flat files and build very interactive presentation reports like reports in simple tabular format, pivot reports, graphs and charts with drill anywhere feature which means that you don’t have to define the hierarchy or drill path and slicing and dicing and Dashboards with many features like hyperlinks to the details reports and embedded browser which can be used to view any other web application to open within the Dashboards.
(b) Hyperion Financial Reporting Studio: Windows client where you can connect to the multidimentional data sources and create highly formatted financial reports by simply dragging and dropping rows and columns and defining page breaks.
(c) Hyperion SQR Reporting Studio: Windows client where you can connect to wide range of data sources and produce high volume pixel perfect operational reports and can be scheduled.
(d) Hyperion Web Analysis: Java applet where you can connect to different data sources using JDBC and build interactive reports and dashboards.
Smart view for office: This is a tight integration with Microsoft Office tools where ou can do analysis like drill downs, keep only and remove only options, POV manager, data refresh, copying data cells and pasting to MS Word and Powerpoint which automatically gets refreshed if the data changes in the source etc. There is one more component in smart wiew which is Hyperion Visual Explorer(HVE), where again you can view the data in presentable interactive graphs and charts.
Application Layer: It consists of two parts :
Web Tier: It consists of two parts (a) Web server- to send and receives content from the web clients. (b) Application server- it is a J2EE application server.
Web server and application server are connected using an HTTP connector.
The web Tier hosts the web applications like workspace, web analysis, interactive , SQR and financial reporting applications.
2. Services Tier: It contains services and servers that controls the functionality of the web applications and clients. Core services handles repository information, authorization, session information, documents publication.