Smart Space, announced in November 2006, is the industry’s first personalized information delivery solution that delivers “always-on” business intelligence (BI) and BPM to knowledge workers throughout the enterprise. Smart Space gadgets are mini-applications that provide content from Hyperion System 9 software, uniquely integrated into the Windows environment. End users can access a whole library of gadgets, assemble their own personalized environment, and modify the gadgets simply by dragging and dropping or with a single mouse click. Because the gadgets reside on the desktop, they provide users with fast, rich, and interactive access to the information they need.

Since the announcement of Smart Space, Hyperion partners have been actively building gadgets that present subsets of Hyperion System 9 functionality to users.

Applied OLAP’s Dodeca™ software is designed to leverage the same technologies as Hyperion System 9 Smart Space, and therefore, provides the ideal platform to quickly implement this exciting new method to deliver “always-on” BI and BPM.

“We are very eager to continue developing gadgets for Hyperion System 9 Smart Space that leverage our Dodeca environment,” said Tim Tow, president and founder of Applied OLAP, Inc. “Dodeca and Smart Space provide a unique way to give users a truly personalized BPM experience. Our Dodeca Outline Viewer, Ad Hoc Analysis, and Hyperion System 9 Planning Spreadsheet gadgets are the first of many gadgets that allow companies to manage their business with greater efficiency than ever before.”

Kerdock Consulting, a Preferred Hyperion Partner, has created three gadgets that are a direct result of customer requests. These gadgets include a Cube Freshness gadget to help customers monitor the latency of the data in their Essbase applications, a Threshold Monitor gadget to alert users when key metrics exceed a certain range, and a Folder Monitor gadget to notify users when new content is published to a particular folder in the Hyperion System 9 repository.

“We invite customers to bring us their ideas for Smart Space gadgets,” said Emil Fernandez, president of Kerdock. “We believe that focusing on the customer is key to creating gadgets that will meet the real-world demands of business users, and will ultimately lead to increased adoption of the Smart Space platform.”

Ranzal & Associates, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Edgewater Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:EDGW), has built the Smart Planning gadget that enables Hyperion System 9 Planning users to track the status of plans in real time. This gadget alerts users to any changes in the state of their planning units and reports all plan annotations. With the Smart Planning gadget, user productivity is greatly improved during the budgeting cycle by enabling planners to immediately react to changes in their plans. For example, a brand category manager could be notified when the overall marketing plan is completed, or a department manager could be alerted when unit cost rates are updated, regardless of the current state or owner of the planning unit.

TopDown Consulting, Inc., a recognized leader in the deployment of high-quality business performance management solutions and Hyperion Preferred Partner, will debut their TopDown Viewer gadget, which allows users to access reports from Hyperion System 9 Financial Reporting and views from Hyperion System 9 Web Analysis, to streamline their daily tasks. TopDown is helping knowledge workers realize how Smart Space can dramatically improve productivity and gain immediate benefit from out of the box gadgets.

“We believe that Smart Space is a key step toward realizing TopDown’s vision of true BPM and BI integration,” said Juan Porter, president, TopDown Consulting, Inc. “Smart Space gadgets will allow us to reshape our customers’ views of their desktops and dashboards, enriching the user’s experience and allowing a level of collaboration not previously available.”

“We’re pleased to work with Hyperion partners to bring our information democracy vision to reality,” said Rich Clayton, vice president of product marketing at Hyperion. “Hyperion System 9 Smart Space provides a platform for partners to rapidly deliver functionality from Hyperion System 9 to put BI and BPM in the hands of every knowledge worker. We commend these partners for their innovation and foresight to be one of the first to market with Smart Space gadgets.”

In addition to partners showcasing gadgets for Smart Space, Solutions 2007 breakout sessions will provide details on Hyperion System 9 Smart Space including the product architecture and tips on gadget creation.

Hyperion announced today that it had surpassed 1,000 Hyperion Financial Management customers, a milestone that confirms Hyperion’s market leadership in consolidation and reporting. The news also points to a growing trend among organizations worldwide to implement proven reporting and consolidation systems in the wake of regulatory requirements.

“Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is an enormous challenge for most businesses – and the larger the business, the more challenging it becomes,” said Ken Kordana, internal reporting manager for The Stanley Works, an S&P 500 company with estimated 2006 revenues of $4 billion and a worldwide supplier of consumer products, industrial tools and security solutions for professional, commercial, industrial and consumer use. After originally implementing Hyperion Enterprise software, The Stanley Works deployed Hyperion Financial Management to take additional control over its reporting and consolidation processes. “Moving to Hyperion Financial Management was a quantum leap that not only allowed us to implement checks and balances in our financial reporting, but it also provided our hundreds of end users with necessary information right at their fingertips. Every day, Hyperion helps us make decisions faster and more efficiently.”

Many organizations also have implemented Hyperion Financial Management to streamline financial processes only to follow with additional Hyperion BPM and business intelligence solutions to improve business performance in other parts of the enterprise.

“With Hyperion Financial Management software, we have moved from a decentralized legacy environment to a user-friendly, centralized system that has enabled a faster close, more transparent access to information from over 60 countries, and a standardized process for financial reporting which is compliant to all the current regulatory requirements,” said Noel Gorvett, group business systems manager for Pearson PLC, an international media company with world-leading businesses in education (Pearson Education), business information (Financial Times) and consumer publishing (Penguin). After first implementing Hyperion Financial Management, the company added Hyperion Planning software, and plans to migrate to Hyperion System 9 in 2007 in an effort to automate not only the company’s financial processes, but its operations as well. “With Hyperion, our users can be confident that once they have submitted their data, it is secure, it’s transparent, and it’s not going to change without their approval.”

Available today as an application within the Hyperion System 9 BPM platform, Hyperion Financial Management is a comprehensive, Web-based financial systems software application that delivers global collection reporting and analysis in a single, highly scalable financial management software solution. Many Hyperion customers have implemented Hyperion Financial Management software to gain control of their financial information and help senior managers become more confident when certifying their annual and quarterly financial results, including disclosure controls and procedures. Although the solution utilizes today’s most advanced technology, is built to be owned and maintained by the enterprise’s finance team. And by implementing Hyperion System 9 BI+ software, enterprises gain a single, comprehensive business intelligence platform with the industry’s broadest range of management reporting and analysis capabilities.

“Hyperion Financial Management has emerged as an essential element of the management system for the global enterprise,” said Rich Clayton, vice president of product marketing for Hyperion. “The proof can be found in enterprises around the world, where Hyperion Financial Management underpins strategic corporate initiatives to gain greater internal control over financial data while reducing the cost of compliance and providing timely insight to financial performance to internal and external stakeholders. As today’s announcement attests, that value has led to some very long-lasting relationships with Hyperion customers, and is delivering more value to more customers than ever before.”

To streamline its planning and budgeting processes throughout its academic, administrative and auxiliary units, New York University (NYU) announced plans to implement Hyperion System 9 from Hyperion (Nasdaq Global Select: HYSL), the global leader in Business Performance Management (BPM) software.

A longtime user of Hyperion Performance Suite software, NYU is migrating to Hyperion System 9 to extend its operational analysis to planning and budgeting functions. In doing so, NYU will gain more accurate insight into both its financial and operational data, enabling more reliable plans and forecasts, and more insightful analysis of ongoing operations.

With Hyperion System 9 Planning, NYU’s financial analysts can leverage a centralized management system that provides an in-depth look at university operations and its related impact on financials by tightly integrating financial and operational planning models. NYU fiscal managers in central university offices, individual schools and business units will generate reports to keep university administrators current on the status of key business processes impacting every member of the NYU community. A combination of Hyperion System 9 modules will tap into the University Data Warehouse, which obtains information directly from NYU’s Student Information System and various financial systems. With Hyperion System 9 BI+ Interactive Reporting, for instance, NYU staff members can access an intuitive and highly interactive interface to design their own dashboards, then quickly monitor their status by drilling down to the most relevant information.

“The Hyperion System 9 BI+ platform will integrate the management, planning and modeling for various financial and business applications into a single, cohesive system,” said Andrew Walsh, senior director of Business Systems Integration, Reporting and Application Development at NYU. “Meanwhile, Hyperion’s BI modules will ensure that all reports are drawn from the same consistent set of information, giving us a unified view of our financial and operational data whenever we need it. We are excited to take this next step with Hyperion – an important technology partner of NYU and a company committed to meeting the needs of higher education.”

ISA Consulting is assisting with the implementation of Hyperion System 9 Planning, which is expected to be completed by the start of NYU’s next fiscal year.

Hyperion (Nasdaq Global Select: HYSL), the global leader in Business Performance Management (BPM) software, today announced that Canadian energy leader Inter Pipeline Fund (Inter Pipeline) has successfully leveraged Hyperion BPM solutions to trim more than $100,000 in administrative costs while reducing the number of hours it takes to prepare budgets by 76 percent.

A global petroleum transportation, storage and natural gas liquids extraction business based in Calgary, Alberta, Inter Pipeline achieved the efficiencies by automating a manual, spreadsheet-based budgeting and reporting infrastructure, even as it saw its revenues grow by more than 1,000 percent in the past five years. In June, Inter Pipeline ranked 62^nd on Profit Magazine’s PROFIT 100 list of the fastest growing companies in Canada.

After evaluating eight commercial solutions, Inter Pipeline selected a range of Hyperion BPM solutions, including Hyperion’s planning, financial management, and reporting software. Help from two consulting firms, Vertical Pitch and Dakota Analytics, enabled the organization to achieve the deployments of Hyperion systems, and to see results in only a few months.

With Hyperion software’s purpose-built modules, Inter Pipeline was able to phase in its deployment by starting first on planning and budgeting in 2004, and then moving to financial reporting, management and compliance starting in 2005. Hyperion’s planning software gave managers greater control over planning and budgeting and allowed them to enforce an established workflow to secure approvals for late changes, solving a significant problem that had caused roadblocks in the budgeting process.

Inter Pipeline deployed Hyperion’s reporting software to fix an internal budget reporting system that required two hours or more to run complicated reports, limiting the organization to publishing only five to seven reports a month. But today some 65 Inter Pipeline employees across the organization use Hyperion to streamline the annual budgeting process. Inter Pipeline also uses Hyperion’s reporting software to automatically update 100 reports each month comparing actual numbers to budget and forecast variances.

For monthly financial statements, quarterly income statements, external reporting and monthly consolidation, Inter Pipeline’s finance department relies on Hyperion’s financial management software. Hyperion features like currency translation save the organization precious man-hours every month. Meanwhile, the senior financial accountant can drill down into financial results to gain a better understanding of the organization’s performance. By replacing spreadsheets with automated windows and Web-based tools, Hyperion also has outfitted the organization with a stronger, more trusted compliance process, virtually eliminating the potential for formula errors, manual errors and missed data.

“With tight budget deadlines and 1,000 spreadsheets, achieving reliable accuracy was very time consuming,” said Mark Mazurek, senior pipeline accountant at Inter Pipeline. “In our previous system, results were linked through formulas, so it was a huge administrative task to make sure our numbers were as accurate as possible. But as a result of deploying Hyperion we reduced the time needed to create a budget from 200 man-hour days to 48 — a 76 percent reduction — and we saved about $100,000 in administrative time.”

Hyperion (Nasdaq Global Select: HYSL), the global leader in Business Performance Management software (BPM), today unveiled Hyperion System 9 Capital Expense Planning, the industry’s first packaged solution focused on automating the entire process of planning for capital asset-related expenses.

A module with both pre-built functionality and flexible customization tools, Capital Expense Planning extends the capabilities of Hyperion System 9 Planning software. Capital Expense Planning enables both financial and operational planners to collaboratively manage capital assets and related expenses. As a result, planners can instantly assess the impact a specific capital expense might have on general expense plans and financial statements – and take immediate action when necessary. The new module is built on Hyperion’s integrated business planning framework, which helps to ensure accurate forecasts and enhances predictability.

Capital Expense Planning represents a dramatic improvement over simplified template solutions for forecasting, budgeting or planning because it delivers pre-built functionality that encompasses best practices, lowers implementation time and expense, and enables organizations to customize their capital asset expense planning application to meet unique business requirements.

“Hyperion System 9 Release 9.3 really comes through for finance teams charged with managing capital assets from planning all the way to retirement or sale,” said Thai Nguyen, financial systems manager at Ask.com. “The new Capital Expense Planning module empowers managers to see an asset from nearly every helpful angle. Powerful tools like this have a bottom-line impact on organizations trying to rein in costs and maximize their asset use.”

“Although accurate and predictable forecasts are vital for any organization, many finance groups still rely on manual spreadsheets or customized applications to facilitate the planning process, with only limited involvement from the cost centers,” said Rich Clayton, vice president of product marketing at Hyperion. “Capital Expense Planning is the first packaged application to fully automate the capital expense planning process and to create a collaborative environment in which finance and business operations work together to improve plan accuracy, predictability and accountability. By eliminating manual, time-consuming, redundant and error-prone spreadsheets, enterprises can trim planning cycle time, leaving more time to focus on analysis.”

Capital Expense Planning provides financial and operational planners with an automated framework within which they can jointly plan for capital assets and related expenses. Planners can maintain granular control over capital expenses with pre-built functionality that enables them to:

* Set global assumptions, such as useful life, depreciation and amortization methods, and cash flow and funding incidences; * Calculate depreciation and amortization; * Plan for the addition of new tangible and intangible assets; * Modify existing capital assets with improvements, impairments, and retirements; * Transfer capital assets from one cost center to another using multiple methods; * Plan for capital-asset-related expenses, such as costs of maintenance, repair, and insurance; and * Visualize the impact of capital asset expenses on the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement in real time.

Because the new module is part of Hyperion’s integrated business planning framework, all data entered via Capital Expense Planning is automatically integrated within an organization’s main plan generated in Planning, so any change made in the module is instantly reflected in the general expense plan. This shared, real-time access allows planners to efficiently review the effect capital expense plan modifications can have on the income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement and general expenses.

The new module also includes customization tools and capabilities so planners can modify – or even completely redefine – any of the pre-built functionality, such as calculations, accounts and menus based on their unique business requirements.

The Capital Expense Planning module also features dependable, built-in security protection for data, calculations and global settings. Flexible settings can enable one planner to view data for a single cost center only, whereas another planner may be able to view, add, delete, retire or transfer capital assets across the entire organization.

Hyperion System 9 Capital Expense Planning is planned for release in the next calendar quarter. The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at Hyperion’s discretion.

• BNSF Railway, winner in the category titled “Data Visualization, Prediction and Presentation by Leveraging Customized Solutions.” BNSF implemented Hyperion Essbase analytics software as a centralized source of enterprise performance data. More than 1,200 users of Hyperion Essbase participate in a BI infrastructure that streamlines and informs decision-making by keeping tabs on more than 50 performance metrics.
• Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), winner in the category titled “Information Retrieval and Reporting by Leveraging Off-the-Shelf Enterprise Software.” The world’s largest futures market relied on Hyperion Essbase software as a critical component to a new single, company-wide platform incorporating report development and distribution, dimensional analysis, and performance management dashboards. The result is an organization that is more engaged, self-reliant, agile and efficient.
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), winner in the category titled “Creating a Strategic Vision and Using BI for ROI through Leadership.” RPI relies on Hyperion-based dashboards to chronicle the past, track current activities and anticipate future events. Some 650 users at RPI access hundreds of dynamic, customizable reports and flexible dashboards that accommodate varying levels of end-user expertise.
• Helzberg Diamonds won honorable mention in the category of “Creating a Strategic Vision and Using BI for ROI through Leadership.” Helzberg uses Hyperion Performance Suite for all planning and budgeting related activities, as well as nationwide performance tracking and reporting.

“In the hands of smart and visionary organizations, the best BI platform is capable of achieving remarkable things,” said John L. Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion. “Once again, Hyperion is proud to see its customers achieve the kind of recognition reserved for those who find better paths for others to follow. We congratulate all of this year’s honorees in the BI Perspectives Awards program. Their achievements are truly noteworthy.”

To achieve its standardization goals, the company will use Hyperion System 9 Financial Management software, a comprehensive, Web-based financial systems application that delivers global collection reporting and analysis in a single, highly scalable solution and Hyperion System 9 Planning software, a centralized, financial planning, budgeting and forecasting tool that drives collaborative, integrated, event-based planning processes throughout the enterprise for a wide range of financial and operational needs.

“We anticipate having better financial reporting — from consolidation to planning and forecasting — across the organization with our move to Hyperion System 9,” said Jeffrey Siegel, vice president and corporate controller at Univar. “Being Web-enabled will be a big benefit for data loading and reporting functions, as well as making information accessible throughout the company. The improved process controls and enhanced forecasting and budgeting functions will provide us with more detailed audit trails.”