Powerplay vs Oracle vs Hyperion

[Edis, Bob]

G'day John

I had some experience with the Oracle OLAP and reporting tools at GE Power
Systems last year.  The Oracle Discoverer tools was quite lacking in
features compared with PowerPlay and Impromptu is definitely a better
reporting tool than what Oracle offers.

I do not have any experience with Hyperion tools (Essbase, etc).  I do
understand that while they are very good, they are also much more expensive
than Cognos' tools.  A Gartner Group report (if you can believe it) I saw
last year had Business Objects and Cognos PowerPlay neck and neck as the
definite leaders in the OLAP reporting tool arena.  The Cognos tools are
especially good as far as web interfacing goods.

For 'what if' scenarios I believe you should look at Cognos Scenario and
4Thought tools.

I am using Cognos DecisionStream, PowerPlay web, IWR, Upfront, and
PowerHouse Web to manage a corporate data warehouse.  Given what my users
have with the regional transaction systems they use, this toolset gives them
a huge improvement in their reporting capabilities.  These tools sit on a MS
SQL Server 7 RDBMS/MS Windows NT platform and operate quite effectively even
over dial-up connections to our intranet.

I hope that helps a bit.

Blue

-----Original Message-----
From: John Hunter [mailto:jthunter@nbnet.nb.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 9:59 AM
To: POWERH-L@lists.swau.edu
Subject: Powerplay vs Oracle vs Hyperion


Hi,

We are in the process of looking at different approaches
that will allow our end users the ability to view our
detailed data warehouse information through the web (or
otherwise) at summary and detailed levels.  We have looked 
at both Cognos and Oracle tools and have had site visits by
each.  We will be looking at Hyperion and their tools and
we are also going to investigate writing the application in
house.

One thing that we might need is the ability to add 'what if'
scenarios to these queries.  It doesn't seem likely with the
Cognos or Oracle approaches that this is possible without 
some sort of customization on our part.

Another biggie is the cost.  Looks like hundreds of thousands!

Does anyone have good, bad, or ugly comments on any of the
above software ventures that they wouldn't mind passing along?

Any suggestions would be great.

P.S. We run many oracle7 databases and our legacy system is written
in Powerhouse 4GL on top of Interbase.

Thanks,
-John

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