I have a confession. I still love Essbase Six. It's got 80% of the goodies of the latest Essbases and can be put together with 20% of the effort. Remember native users? Remember Application Manager? Remember cutting and pasting from Excel to the outline? Ahh for the good old days.
Well the good old days are never coming back, but for those of you fortunate enough to have an old copy of Essbase Six lying around there is some good news. Just like SQL Server Express, it's a great prototyping tool and you can still use it on XP.
Since I've been around several blocks, including what is in retrospect, an ill-advised trip over the the Microsoft dark side of BI, I've had a chance to hear a lot of opinion about Oracle, Essbase and Hyperion. One that sticks with me is the complaint of one well-respected chap that the Oracle stack has just gotten too bloody thick. There are all sorts of implications both good and bad that I won't belabor here except for one and that is speed.
If you have studied military strategy on any level, sooner or later you will come around to the genius of John Boyd. Boyd's theory of aircraft combat boils down to this, if you can execute faster than the enemy, then you automatically outhink him. So air superiority in dogfights goes to the pilot who can turn quicker.
I have found that with Essbase Six in your toolkit, you can accelerate your development times in Planning and EPMA. Just do a lot of mockup using the old school skills during design and then translate them when it's build time into the newer stack. It's a bit much to carry around on a laptop, but it can be done. Whereas an installation of EPM 11 is simply not going to fit very well at all.
Speed may seem like the enemy to the biller of time and materials, but working with a model that can be tweaked 30 times a week delivers a great deal more quality in the end than one that can only be changed 5 times a week. Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, see Oracle for details of support for Essbase Six..
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