Hi folks,

I suppose the products of Hyperion;

http://www.hyperion.com/products/bpm_suite/

are proprietary software. But I could not discover the price of each product offered. Any comment?

Are there similar software from Open Source. Please advise. TIA

B.R.
satimis

The hardest part of dealing with sales people...

Getting them to tell you how much it costs.

I'm reminded of a saying, if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.

Unless someone else can chime in, I'm having a bit of a difficult time understanding what hyperion does other then graphs of reports. I'm sure it does something on the level of analysis, but it's a bit vague.

The question really is, what do you want to do?

Hi cylix,

I went to Euro Tech Conference on 8~9 March, 2005 where I was in touch of Basel II and Hyperion Essbase, software for banking business. Thereafter I started searching about the later which brought me to Hyperion products. That was the story.

I'm interested finding out products applicable to banking business from Open Source.

B.R.
satimis

If you're still looking for Essbase prices, I think the other reply of "If you have to ask..." is probably about right. I implemented an Essbase project for a client back in 1998/99 and the price for the Essbase server licence was approx £30K, plus £3K per concurrent user, with annual maintenance of 18%. The platform was Solaris and the client was a global blue chip (founder preferred his cars in black) so they received very good discounts. A development only version of the server licence was available for £5K. All these figures are obviously very old now, so you probably have to speak to Hyperion to get a quote specifically for your needs. The licensing was quite tightly controlled (I'm no hacker, so maybe there are ways to get in), the licence keys controlled which elements of the software could be used, i.e. if the licence key wasn't set up correctly the software wouldn't run, e.g. a running server, but no user ports, or user ports licensed for a different server. I spent many an hour on the phone to Hyperion UK and US to sort that little conundrum.

If you do find a way to set up an Essbase system 'on a budget' (development only perhaps) please post how. I've been looking at Red Hat, which Essbase 'apparently' supports, but I think you still need to enter a licensing agreement with Hyperion (and they're selective about who they deal with, so you need to be a serious customer and not just someone with a passing interest in OLAP).

If you get into it the OLAP thing is very powerful, as suggested by Cylix, a bit more than graphs. Imagine having the answers to all your analysis questions ready calculated and sitting in a box just waiting for you to ask (oversimplification, but that's the basic idea, your data is pre-aggregated for you). "Speed of thought processing" is how it was pitched to us, and they weren't wrong, fire off the query and the results came back in less than a second.