Q&A: Hyperion CTO touts the upcoming Avalanche

Computerworld - Hyperion Solutions Corp. is ramping up its next-generation platform, code-named Avalanche, that will tie together its scorecards, dashboards and reporting tools in a single runtime environment. John Kopcke, Hyperion's chief technology officer, spoke this week with Computerworld about the new platform, which is due out in September, and its efforts to break free of its image as a financial planning and budgeting company.
Hyperion is preparing for a two-phase launch of your next-generation platform. Can you provide details on this? Project Avalanche is focused on simplifying the entire spectrum of business intelligence technologies. One of the things holding back large-scale adoption of BI has been the complexity and the number of products you had to deploy to cover the entire spectrum of usage. The first phase coming out in September will be focused on the information consumer, the 80% of users using these systems on a daily basis. A business user will have one business performance workspace in which all the things they need to do are provided in a single offering rather than jumping from one tool to another and having differing user interfaces.
Avalanche will cover classic relational query and reporting to multidimensional query and reporting and include management, operational and financial reporting tied in with dashboards and score cards. In the summer of 2006, we will provide a single development environment.
What is your take on Business Objects' announcement in July that it will acquire SRC, a financial planning, budgeting and consolidation vendor -- essentially targeting Hyperion's traditional stronghold? It is a validation of our approach to the market. We think Business Objects has a large challenge in front of them to take a solution that had under 2% of the marketplace and typically was positioned at medium-sized businesses and bring it up to being competitive at our level.
We are a 25-year-old company, [and] when you think of financial solutions and business performance management you routinely think of Hyperion. When you say "business intelligence," we may not be top of mind for most companies out there. Hyperion is changing its profile in this space. We are laying claim that BI is core to what we do.
In the December [2004] quarter we saw our business intelligence revenue grow 50% year over year and in the March quarter it grew 40%. The BI market as a whole has not been growing anywhere near those numbers.
Hyperion also is planning an announcement this month on a 64-bit version of Essbase, your enterprise analytic infrastructure. What is the impetus behind this move? Sixty-fourbit changes the whole world in terms of the computational and data complexity we can go after. If 32-bit processing was comparable to a city block, then 64-bit processing is comparable to the surface of the Earth. [There are] a lot of ... analytics that retailers do with a large number of SKUs and a large number of customers. ... [Retailers] want to do detailed analysis of buyer behaviors, [and] 64-bit makes it easy to attack those very complex problems.

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