BI bonanza in busy upgrade week

In a busy week for business intelligence, three vendors issued upgrades and enhancements to their offerings.

Tuesday Hyperion Solutions Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif., announced its new BI platform, which combines its version 7 of its Essbase OLAP server and the Hyperion Performance Suite 8.2, which includes features brought over in the acquisition of Brio Software.

The new platform includes new predictive analytics for power users, improved personalized dashboards, new performance monitoring with triggers and alerts, and new customization features for building specialized applications. Hyperion's platform also offers end-to-end support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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Coremetrics Inc., Burlingame, Calif., spruced up its software to include Web site and online marketing performance analysis. Coremetrics TrueMeasure takes the company's LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) profiles and identifies the marketing source that led to the customer acquisition without overlap, according to Coremetrics. Identifying the marketing expenditure most recently responsible for each customer conversion allows users to measure the effectiveness of initiatives.

Additionally, a "zoom" feature, allows users to focus on any marketing element and analyze its performance across search engines. Users can see which product sells through which marketing element regardless of placement. The new Coremetrics Online Analytics application features a new marketing manager interface. The interface groups programs by channels and the LIVEview feature enables users to analyze pages and links on their own website.

On Monday, Information Builders Inc., New York, announced that its iWay Software company has upgraded its ETL Manager.

Version 5.5 has a new data integration application that is easier to use and enhances performance and auditing, the company said. Auditing capabilities now include real-time collection of information about ETL tasks on different platforms. ETL Manager now performs "source transformation," which occurs on host platforms before any data gets moved to the central ETL Manager server. The transformation eliminates the custom code needed to move legacy information, while still keeping bandwidth and central processing low, according to Information Builders.

The company has also redesigned its graphical user interface with improved data flow to create ETL tasks that map one or more data sources into one or more targets to simplify development.