US-based Hyperion, a company operating in the area of recently launched the Essbase OLAP server in India. A platform capable of supporting many different categories of existing and emerging analytic applications, the company will be marketing the solution in India through Mumbai-based Thirdware Solution Limited. Says Pradeep Erinjery, director, Thirdware Solution Limited, "As the underlying online analytical processing (OLAP) software technology, Hyperion Essbase organises and presents data along familiar business dimensions such as products, customers, geographies, time periods etc allowing end-users to view and explore that data intuitively. This in turn assists in formulating better business decisions."

By acting as a framework and engine for business analysis, Hyperion Essbase allows organisations to leverage data in their data warehouses, legacy systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP)systems, e-business systems and customer relationship management (CRM)applications. Hyperion delivers tight integration with many popular ERP,CRM and data warehousing systems to facilitate rapid deployment and easy maintenance, lowering an organisation 's total cost of ownership.

Erinjery adds that the server forms the backbone of more than 100 industry-leading analytic applications developed by Hyperion and more than 300 Hyperion Alliance Partners. Hundreds of powerful, easy-to-use calculation functions, along with a rich scripting language that supports procedural, statistical and dimensional calculations, make it the server of choice for building the most powerful analytic applications.

Essbase's open architecture makes information available in a variety of formats to support the diverse user communities, application requirements and information delivery architectures found in an enterprise. Dozens of tools from Hyperion and Hyperion Alliance Partners provide out-of-the-box and custom development options that deliver information in many types of client/server and Web-enabled interfaces, including HTML, Java and ActiveX. Finally, the server boasts of a unique multi-user read/write capability and a robust security model, which are required to support sophisticated modelling and planning applications.