I was asked recently by one of our partners to explain the difference between CXO-Cockpit and OBIEE 11G regarding dashboards on Oracle | Hyperion Financial Management. This blog post contains the answer to our partner with the comparison:

Please let us explain the differences between “OBIEE for Hyperion” and “CXO-Cockpit for Hyperion”. We will highlight the differences between the tools, because they are quite significant:

Why OBIEE?
Our take on OBIEE is relatively simple. OBIEE is a powerful yet full blown generic BI environment meant to service all types of (combined) data like HR, Sales, Operational, ERP, Finance etc. So if your customers are looking for an overall company-wide BI solution to service all types of different data, OBIEE is a recommendable choice (just like other generic BI vendors like Qlikview, BO (SAP), Cognos (IBM) are good alternatives). However, due to the generic DNA of OBIEE it misses the financial intelligence that make systems like Hyperion so powerful.

Why CXO-Cockpit?
In other words, if your customer is looking for a web-based reporting solution on top of Hyperion applications instead of a companywide approach, it would not be a straight forward decision to go for OBIEE for several reasons. We know the Hyperion systems inside out and we understand what customers want from a reporting perspective. As you know, Hyperion Customers can be very demanding with Hyperion specific wish lists. It will be therefore extremely difficult to successfully implement OBIEE purely in top of Hyperion systems, simply because of a lack of specific powerful Hyperion finance functionalities. This will seriously limit the reporting capabilities of OBIEE on top of for instance HFM. Also do not forget that the finance department will lose control over the beloved Hyperion data, because OBIEE will be an IT driven process and not a finance driven process.

Current market status:
We are of course aware that Oracle is pushing OBIEE for EPM (Hyperion) into the market, but it is not un-important to understand that, although OBIEE has been around for a while, OBIEE for Hyperion is a completely new solution. We have only seen PPT’s so far and have not heard of any clients yet who have successfully implemented OBIEE directly on top of for instance HFM (which seems to have the focus of Oracle). Also the direct integration of OBIEE with HFM is very sketchy and unclear. Oracle will sell the OBIEE messaging for Hyperion apps very convincingly, but please be aware that a lot of it is built on new technology.

CXO-Cockpit currently has a global client base of over 35 large Hyperion customers using our dashboard technology. We will guarantee a simple 1 week implementation and we can even produce a 2 day proof of concept for any Hyperion customer to prove our solution does work on top of their Hyperion app.

Conclusion:
We believe OBIEE is a solid generic BI tool, but that it is far from being suitable to service Hyperion applications the way your Hyperion customers expect a web-based solution should produce Hyperion information. We suspect that Hyperion based OBIEE projects will end up in trial and error based IT driven projects. It will be expensive and risky and the finance department will no longer be in control of THEIR Hyperion data.