Essbase: Still Going Strong After All These Years

essbasecovergraphic_croppedWhen Essbase came on the market back in the early 1990s (originally developed by Arbor Software), few of us expected the application to remain so popular for this long. Over a short period of time the majority of the Fortune 1000 adopted it. Well over 20 years later (and since becoming Hyperion Essbase and eventually Oracle Essbase) what keeps it so popular, and so useful?

The second half of the 1980’s saw the rise of spreadsheets, and Microsoft Excel became the crucial tool in Finance departments for analysis, reporting, planning and “what-iffing.” The concept of Essbase came from imagining a spreadsheet being capable of going beyond two dimensions (columns and rows), to as many dimensions as needed to describe your data – for example by product, department, customer, time period, and so on. In fact, the “Ess” in the name is from “Extended Spreadsheet.”

Essbase assures the data ties out every which way you look at it – that is, by every dimension. Putting the model on a server (rather than remaining locally stored on individual users’ computers) means that all users now have access to the same validated data, using common names, with the same trusted aggregated totals and calculated metrics.

“One version of the truth” became the mantra for this marvel of technology. Needing to do analysis, reporting, planning and “what-iffing” on a larger scale, more formally and for a larger audience made Essbase the next technology staple of the Finance department and beyond.

Here are a few of the top reasons I credit for Essbase’s enduring popularity:

Intuitive design and easy to learn. People with business knowledge, but no technology background, easily understand the concept of “dimensions.” Users are up and running creating queries and reports in minutes. Those with spreadsheet skills can quickly learn enough to develop simple but useful Essbase models.

Works great with Excel. Essbase’s native interface is the spreadsheet. To the user, Essbase is an add-in menu that provides functions for retrieving data from the Essbase model to create a report directly in Excel. The created report is a normal spreadsheet, and can be viewed by anyone else who has Excel even if they don’t have access to Essbase.

Enables versatile modeling. With Essbase you can model almost any analytic, reporting and planning challenge, from aggregations of data across hierarchies and dimensions to driver-based projections. Write-back from Excel to Essbase is possible, and robust security accommodates multiple user roles. If you can do it in Excel, you can probably do it (and better) with Essbase.

Improvements have extended Essbase’s capabilities. Over the years, performance improvements and new features have enabled larger data sets and more complex analytics, extending the range of business analysis, reporting and planning needs the product can address. Enterprise-wide Essbase solutions that are well integrated with source systems and used by hundreds of people are common.

 

What makes you an Essbase fan? If you don’t know Essbase but want to take a look, I’d be happy to show you a demo, so feel free to reach out.