Analytics and planning software maker Hyperion Solutions recently began shipping Hyperion System 9, a comprehensive overhaul that marries Hyperion's business intelligence (BI) and financial management applications into one user interface.

The updated suite, which is scheduled for official announcement this week but was released to customers in late September, is the first to fully meld Hyperion's flagship Essbase analytics engine with the reporting technology the company picked up through its 2003 acquisition of Brio Software, according to Srikant Gokulnatha, Hyperion's director of product marketing and strategy.

California-based Hyperion took advantage of the extensive redevelopment process to work with an outside design consultancy and create a completely new, simplified user interface. "We decided that we needed to throw out all the old concepts we had about how interfaces needed to be built," Gokulnatha said.

Hyperion's goal was to blend BI tools like analytics and reporting with business performance management (BPM) applications such as financial planning and scorecard-based measurement functionality. The aim is to give users "workspaces" that allow them to access and interact with a wide variety of corporate data without hopping in and out of disparate applications.

Hyperion customer Kevin Cook, director of firmwide financial reporting systems at McLean, Virginia-based management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., expects the unified interface to be a big hit with Booz Allen's thousands of Hyperion users. It's a feature that has been consistently requested, Cook said, and although the upgrade involves adjusting to a new look and feel, he expects the new software's learning curve will be small.

"It's a Web-based tool, so we're thinking [users] are going to adapt pretty quickly," Cook said.

Dan Miller, a Booz Allen senior manager responsible for overseeing the firm's Hyperion deployment, said the unified system will be easier to maintain and makes him more likely to expand users' access to include additional Hyperion modules. Although Booz Allen licenses a broad array of Hyperion's applications -- including Hyperion's Intelligence query and analysis tool, its Analyzer graphical analysis tool and its Reports software -- many users are currently only equipped with a small subset.

"Now I can put all of this on one Web page," Miller said. "Previously, if I got a request for new functionality from a Reports user, I was probably limited to keeping them in Reports, or introducing an additional login and a whole new way of getting data. With System 9, I can open up all those different applications and all that functionality."

Hyperion competes -- and, in some cases, cohabits -- with rival BI vendors Cognos and Business Objects. Booz Allen is also a Cognos customer, and plans to continue using Cognos' ReportNet software for its ad-hoc reporting, Cook said. By the time Hyperion had competitive software available to meet that need, Booz Allen was already deeply invested in Cognos' technology, he said.

Pricing for Hyperion System 9 varies widely by deployment size and configuration, but Hyperion estimated the licensing fee for a typical 125-user deployment starts at around US$100,000.