We are proud to announce that as off the 3rd of April 2012 the new CXO-Cockpit Mobile App for SAP BPC (formerly known as OutlookSoft) is released in Apples iTunes store.

We often get the question what is the difference between a dashboard tool like for instance QlikView and CXO-Cockpit, for the purpose of creating an Executive dashboard on top of Hyperion Financial Management.

Because of the proprietary nature (relational in combination with highly dimensional data) of the Hyperion Financial Management database and the mainly finance orientated output, building a dashboard on top Hyperion Financial Management is not easy. You therefore really have to look at the details to see the most important differences. This document describes in detail what those differences are, because do not let the pretty interface of QlikView (or any other generic dashboard tool) fool you.

THE MAIN DIFFERENCE IS THAT:
The CXO-Cockpit is an out-of-the-box and pre-built application that is purposely built for Hyperion Financial Management users, whereas QlikView is a generic tool, with which the customer is able to create an application on top of any generic type of data warehouse or system. If you are in doubt always ask for a Proof of Concept on your HFM database and ask QlikView to build the dashboards you really need for management information, not the ones that they suggest to build for you!!

This results in:
a) Different through put time and costs of your project:
Simply creating a stable connecting to HFM will be very difficult (or even impossible) for a tool as QlikView, because of the combination of relational and highly dimension data that is stored in HFM. Furthermore building content will take time and expect resources to complete. If you have lots of expert resources and time available to build such an application from scratch, QlikView can be a reasonable alternative. Please be aware that we can build a fully functional CXO-Cockpit (POC) based on your Financial Management data in only 2 days!!!

b) Difference in functionality and acceptance:
It is unrealistic to assume that any QlikView application would be able to create the type of functionality that your management expects from a financial dashboard, whereas we deliver all that required information as being standard available in the CXO-Cockpit. Because we have built the functionality of the CXO-Cockpit based on best practices among our customers, your management will instantly recognize and accept the set-up and the information being displayed to them. Actuals comparison with any of the categories in HFM is key for management reporting. QlikView will have huge difficulties understanding simple things as color coding for a cost or an income account.

c) Lower total cost of ownership:
Because of low monthly license fees of only 4000,– euro per month in combination with the fact that the CXO-Cockpit can be implemented very fast, requiring no additional knowledge or FTE to maintain it, the overall running cost of your dashboard will be significantly lower than with for instance QlikView.

d) The iPad and Mobile app:
Our mobile offering (see screenshots below) is 100% included in the standard CXO-Cockpit software. Delivering HFM information via an iPad, iPhone or Android device is therefore extremely simple and cost effective because it is all part of the standard CXO-Cockpit set-up.

MORE DETAILED AND SPECIFIC DIFFERENCES ARE:

1. Difference in the ETL process
In order to create a dashboard from Hyperion Financial Management, first an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process is needed to create a database with a good structure for any reporting tool.

The CXO-Cockpit has an automatic ETL process that “Transforms” the Financial Management extracts into a ‘perfect’ structure, using an In-house optimized version of Hyperion Extended Analytics. We therefore can create a perfect OLAP cube of your HFM data with minimum labour. Remember we can build a fully working HFM model of the CXO-Cockpit in only 2 days. That includes the exaction of Meta data and setting up the whole front-end of the HFM Dashboard with about 20 different dashboards as well.
QlikView can only retrieve data from a clean and well structured ODBC data source (remember that Hyperion Financial Management is not an ODBC compliant data source) and extracting and transforming Hyperion Financial Management data into a clean ODBC structure (like CXO does) needs to be programmed by the customer (a significant effort). From that predefined cleaned data structure, QlikView does not create a predefined OLAP structure, but takes the raw data and re-aggregates everything on the fly. However, it takes a very smart calculation to calculate everything in the same (specific) way that Hyperion Financial Management does, taking into account the financial intelligence inherent in the application (income and expense attributes, currencies etc). As far as we know, that intelligence is not available as standard within QlikView and requires a lot of additional specification, programming, testing and documentation to make sure that the result in QlikView are always exactly the same as in Hyperion Financial Management.

In order for the client organization to see how QlikView deals with it, it is important to focus in detail on the first steps of a: show that the data is in Hyperion Financial Management b. Show how the data gets out of Hyperion Financial Management c. show the reports that will come direct out of the data structure (and not out of a manually prepared demo database)

2. Difference in the output
Although QlikView has good products, they are not designed for management dashboards on Hyperion Financial Management. QlikView is designed to create reporting front-ends for users that do know the structure, and can therefore live with the visibility of the (complex) underlying data structures. CXO-Cockpit users normally do not want to know anything about data structures, it is designed for end-user without systems knowledge. The CXO-Cockpit understands the type of data in the database and applies business logic before presenting it to the user. A product like QlikView typically does not do that. As a few examples on how you can see the difference:

- Recognition of good and bad
In a product such as QlikView, accounts with income and expense attributes are normally added to each other, where the CXO-Cockpit recognizes their valuation as positive or negative. Most of the time, QlikView require costs to be presented and income as positive, forcing the customer to work with a number format that is very unusual (and uncomfortable) for this type of information.

- Creation of an account hierarchy
Products like QlikView assume that a dimension like an account is structured as a dimension. However, in Hyperion Financial Management, there is no hierarchy. In the CXO-Cockpit we therefore have functionality to create hierarchies of formatted account lists, to allow the users to drill down into a virtual hierarchy. This functionality is not standard within QlikView.

- Usefulness
Where products like QlikView prefer to demo fancy gauges and other colorful animated graphs, CXO-Cockpit focuses on the reports that are most desired by the business managers: comfortably formatted P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash flow, Working Capital, with intuitive and clear graphs, based on best practices learned from over 10 years of building dashboards on Hyperion solutions.

In order for the client organization to see what QlikView can, they best skip the fancy KPI gauges and directly ask for a demo of a complete profit and loss, with a drill down into the details and a proper variance indication with a correct good/bad variance based on the actual data from Financial Management (not from a demo database)

3. Other differences
- Security
Security is very important for information like in Hyperion Financial Management. Normally companies want to restrict users from one division to see data from other divisions. Products like QlikView normally have a structure related to the reports, but do not have the intelligence to create a security structure based on the divisional structure. So everybody can see all data by default. If it is possible at all, a security structure can only be achieved with additional programming and maintenance efforts. Divisional security (but also report based security) is available out-of-the-box in CXO-Cockpit.

- Contextual narratives and integration with E-mail
With the CXO-Cockpit, narratives can be defined by the administrator to be relative to any key in the point of view. This is not standard functionality within QlikView and can only be achieved with additional programming

In order for a client organization to understand how QlikView deals with this, they should ask for a fixed price implementation where all of this functionality is properly implemented. If QlikView has done this before, they will not have a difficulty to copy/paste this functionality, so it should not be difficult to provide such guarantees (such as CXO-Cockpit does)

In summary, the differences with QlikView are visibly huge, as long as you take a look at the details. We trust you find this information useful.

If you would listen to your Oracle EPM Account Manager he or she would tell you that OBIEE is next generation Web-based Hyperion reporting environment to consider. The only reason why they offer OBIEE to their clients is that there are simply no alternatives on their pricelist anymore that they are able to sell. It is not that OBIEE has a proven track-record to web-enable Hyperion FM and Essbase data, there is simply no alternative anymore now that Web Analysis has clearly become a product that will no longer benefit from further future development by Oracle.

As an existing Web-Analysis customer you basically have 3 options:

• Keep working with Web-Analysis even when it is not supported in the future or simply stop working with Web-Analysis
• Invest heavily in Oracle OBIEE and adopt a very “heavy” BI environment without knowing what your end-result will be.
• Or you could look at alternatives outside the Oracle product range.

If you consider the 3rd option, we invite you to investigate CXO-Cockpit as one of the potential alternatives because CXO-Cockpit was purposely built as a web-based reporting tool for Hyperion products. It is costs are highly predictable, it is easy to maintain and you can already have it up and running on your Hyperion source (HFM, Enterprise and Essbase) within just a couple days. As a sort of bonus CXO-Cockpit automatically will provide you with not only web-based output of all your relevant Hyperion data, it will also automatically be able to port that same data via a professional mobile app to end users via and iPad, iPhone or Android device.

Please check out the following information to get a first impression about our web-based reporting capabilities for Hyperion customers.

Introduction video (120 seconds)

Mobile tutorial video (90 seconds)

Or just visit our web-site via: www.cxo-cockpit.com

The time is ripe for SAP BPC and CXO-Cockpit!
“We have established our footprint in the financial reporting market by focusing entirely on Hyperion customers for the past 4 years” continues Marcel Vlug. “Our customer base and our organization has grown steadily over that period and we are now ready to branch out into other markets says Marcel Vlug.

The main reason for us to enter the SAP BPC market is simple says Wouter Born, COO at CXO Solutions:
1) The technology we use underneath the CXO-Cockpit is exact similar to the technology of SAP BPC, namely Microsoft technology.
2) Looking at the current reporting tools on top of SAP BPC we see a similar situation as with Hyperion. Predominantly, excel is the Reporting tool of choice for SAP BPC customers. We are convinced that if BPC customers want mobile access or just plain simple web-based and/or highly graphical output, the alternatives are expensive and simply not adding any value. SAP BPC customers can either try BO or Xcelsius, and we are convinced that neither of these tools will satisfy their financially driven reporting needs.

Point of Entry in the SAP BPC Market:
Our best point of entry in the SAP BPC market will be via specialized SAP BPC partners who have strong relationship with their customers. If they believe that delivering true business value to their customers at a reasonable price is the way forward, they will clearly see our value proposition and we are sure we will be able to work together on that basis. Furthermore, we will focus our main efforts on those SAP BPC users that are not “wall-to-wall SAP only” customers.

Value of CXO-Cockpit:
We want to conclude this blog with 2 customer quotes about the value we deliver with our web-based Reporting and Analysis platform:

CEO of ESE World René Wolfkamp quotes: “with this iPad app I can have access to all the important Hyperion financial data anywhere and anytime. Knowing that the information is always available and correct, adds incredible value to my day to day business. Especially when I am travelling, but also during my meetings with fellow board members, shareholders and other stakeholders of our company”.
“Besides the value of the iPad app for our board members, CXO-Cockpit has helped us to shorten our reporting cycle drastically, whereby we are able to save time and money, and produce our key periodic financial data much quicker. For instance the possibility for our entities to add their comments in CXO-Cockpit and not in separate reports, has considerably shorted the time to prepare our monthly overviews”, says Joop Visscher, controller at ESE World.

CXO Solutions
Wouter Born, COO
+31 88 2380843

Invensys plc, the FTSE 250 UK-based global technology group, experienced the same problem as many Hyperion customers, namely “how to deal with advanced web-based reporting and analysis requirements from the management”.  Catriona Harrison, Director, Financial Control – Group Reporting Systems at Invensys, explains:

“We developed the vision to deploy dashboards to our senior management to deliver our core financial information from HFM accurately, timely and efficiently.  We investigated two alternative software solutions but we faced stability and response time issues along with some functionality limitations.  With the hope to be ‘third time lucky’, we engaged in a Proof of Concept of the CXO-Cockpit.  With our prior experience of creating a dashboard for our HFM application in the back of our minds, we were of course extremely skeptical whether CXO could pull it off in just a few days. “

If you would like to hear directly from Catriona Harrison how Invensys plc delivered on their vision, we would like to invite you to listen to a recorded version of a 20 minute Webinar that was originally hosted on Tuesday 13th December 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jScR8YgbXx8

First impression:
Besides the initial PowerPoint driven presentation we also had a chance to look at the dashboards that are officially published by Oracle in brochures and via their Web-Site. What struck us most were the very limited output possibilities in combination with the lack of finance intelligence. We are very curious to see what other possibilities OFMA offers, because it became clear to us that the people who have published these graphs are no HFM or finance experts.
In general we very much miss the finance intelligence that Finance people look for in an HFM related solution. We truly encourage you to take a detailed look at these examples, because it is surprising to see that, with this world-wide launch of the OFMA product, everything testifies to the fact that these dashboards are not built by finance people but by IT people with very little HFM background.
The differences:
Nevertheless, the first impression of the OFMA product can impressive but slightly deceiving. There are a lot of differences between both software products you need to be aware of. Whether you are a Hyperion customer evaluating a new dashboard solution for your Hyperion application(s), or if you are a Partner trying to advise your Hyperion customers, please be aware of the following structural differences:

• CXO is full of true finance intelligence and CXO is specifically built for Hyperion products
• CXO delivers the Hyperion reports in a way the management want to see them
• CXO is typically owned by finance, requiring hardly any IT involvement
• CXO is delivered extremely quickly, avoiding long and expensive IT driven BI projects
• CXO is a proven solution with over 40 large multinationals using our software
• CXO is risk-free with our 2 to 3 day Proof of Concept
• CXO licenses are subscription based making our TCO 100% predictable and way lower than OBIIE
• CXO delivers a free and professional iPad app to their customers

Do not be fooled by words:
This new OBIEE based OFMA product for HFM is still a BI product and you would simply not be able to run such a BI solution autonomously within your finance team. This means a larger dependency on IT knowledge, which in fact means: being dependent on others.

CXO-Cockpit is 100% run by the same people that run the Hyperion applications and it is often delivered on the same hardware platform as the existing Hyperion products. Reports and Dashboards are created and maintained with the greatest of ease by the same people that do that already today with SmartView or Hyperion Financial Reports.

Additional key information:
We know that some arguments for not considering CXO-Cockpit keep circling back to us. The most heard arguments are that 1) we do not have a live connection to HFM and 2) that we miss flexibility within our reporting templates. With one of our latest releases we have introduced many new useful features and we can therefore confirm that:

• CXO does have a live connection to HFM
• CXO does have flexibility with our Free-Style template (please see screenshots below)

Our advice:
If your company already owns OBIEE licenses and you have the OBIEE knowledge available within the IT department of your company, this particular OBIEE solution could potentially be a valid option for you. Still you need to be aware of the extremely limited finance functionalities of OFMA.
If however, you do not own OBIEE and you are just using the Hyperion products, building dashboards with OBIEE OFMA will deliver very limited output. Furthermore, buying OBIEE OFMA will require deep pockets because you need an HFM, OBIEE and OFMA license for every single user. It will prove to be a very costly and top-heavy solution that will not deliver what your finance community is looking for in a web-based reporting tool on top of HFM.

Prove:
If you are in doubt whether OBIEE OFMA is the correct product for you or your organization, please challenge Oracle to perform a short Proof of Concept. The proof is, as with many things in life, in the pudding.
As a final remark we want to share this interesting quote from an HFM user. “It appears to us that Oracle does not have a clear vision as to who is the end-user of the OFMA product. Oracle seems to be aiming it at Finance Managers since, for example, they present a process management dashboard. Users who are interested in that data tend to be very comfortable with getting analytical data from HFM directly via SmartView or Reports. They would not need a very expensive dashboard to produce that type of data. We believe that this version of OFMA does not have the content nor the clear and simple looks to attract the executive audience and move them away from PDF and excel”.
Thank you for your time.

Please find below a couple of screenshots from our all new “freestyle” reporting template:

Today is a special day again in the history of our company. We have uploaded the second version of our iPad app in the Apple AppStore. This means you will have to be patient for yet another couple of days before it is officially and publically available to download, but we wanted to give you this “heads-up” anyway.

We are very excited about this second release of our iPad app. The functionality of this version is simply mind-blowing and the performance is also incredible fast. All in all we have made big improvements versus our initial and first version. Our development team has worked incredibly hard over the last couple of months to deliver a production ready version of our iPad app. And today we have reached our first milestone in that process.

The version that is uploaded today provides you with a full demo of the CXO-Cockpit via the iPad. As mentioned it is incredible fast and its functionality is exactly what our target audience is looking for and of course you can drill down and analyze the Hyperion data thru the well acclaimed touch screen interface of the iPad.
We will keep you informed when it will available in the App Store to download, but that will be no longer than 7 to 10 days from today.

For now we can share the latest screenshots of the iPad app with you:

For more information, please visit this link.

As mentioned: stay tuned for more news about the moment you can start downloading our free new iPad app in the App Store.

HFM, Enterprise, Essbase, Planning & HSF information at your finger tips:

CXO-Cockpit for iPad provides mobile professionals with access to decision-critical business intelligence information through the intuitive and well acclaimed iPad interface. CXO-Cockpit for iPad takes Hyperion based business intelligence to a new level of touch-based interactivity, enabling exploration of Hyperion information without the limits of static reporting or being behind a computer connected to the network. With CXO-Cockpit for iPad, business users on the go can access their tailor-made Hyperion information whenever they need it.

Contact: Wouter Born, COO at CXO Solutions.  +31 88 238 0842. www.cxo-cockpit.com

CXO Solutions unveils the latest 4.1 version of CXO-Cockpit remains delivering a lot of added value to Hyperion Enterprise customers.

“Our Hyperion Enterprise customer base already knows what added value we can deliver to their Hyperion Enterprise Applications, says Marcel Vlug CEO of CXO Solutions. “We can not only web-enable Hyperion Enterprise data in just a couple of days, we can also add dimensionality to the Hyperion Enterprise data by creating true dimensions from Hyperion Enterprise sub-accounts, categories, period and years”.

Over 2000 companies still use Hyperion Enterprise!
“We know that there is still a very large existing Hyperion Enterprise customer base available on a global basis. We believe that over 2000 global companies are still relying on their good old Hyperion Enterprise System to provide them with timely and accurate management information”.

“Isn’t time you should move to HFM?”, is probably the most often asked question to Hyperion Enterprise customers over the last decade or so.  For many Enterprise customers moving to yet another consolidation and reporting solution is big (and expensive) step. It is also often an unnecessary step, because Hyperion Enterprise is still doing what it does best: Consolidating and reporting with great speed and accuracy at a very low total cost of ownership.

We really care about Hyperion Enterprise!
“We are aware that there are not many companies in the market today that can actually deliver additional added value to Hyperion Enterprise customers. As an existing Hyperion Enterprise user is good to know that we really care about your consolidation solution and that we keep investing time and money to improve our solution on top Hyperion Enterprise technology”, says Wouter Born, COO at CXO Solutions.

“We would most definitely encourage Hyperion Enterprise customer to have a look at CXO-Cockpit”, continues Wouter Born. “Our solution was built for Hyperion Enterprise professionals by Hyperion Enterprise professionals, and it really adds incredible value to Hyperion Enterprise at the fraction of the cost of a new consolidation system”. Please find below a customer quote by Lars Valkonet, Director Reporting at one of our Hyperion Enterprise customers.

Especially the increased dimensionality and instant Web-Based output of our Hyperion Enterprise data via the CXO-Cockpit was of immediate interest to us. The speed of implementation, the low costs and the best practices approach of the pre-built output makes this tool a very good investment!
Lars Valkonet, Director Group Accounting & Reporting at Schoeller Arca

We would also encourage all Hyperion Enterprise customers on a global basis to visit our specific Hyperion Enterprise section on our web-site to find out more about our solution. Or please feel free to call us or any of our partners in your region to inform you about CXO-Cockpit for Hyperion Enterprise.

About the CXO-Cockpit: The CXO-Cockpit is an advanced Reporting and Analysis Dashboard for Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) ,Hyperion Enterprise (HE), Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Planning that can be implemented in just 1 week. Please watch our 2 minute introduction video for more background and details about CXO-Cockpit. The CXO-Cockpit provides a full range of pre-built financial dashboards and reports, including Balance Sheet, P&L statements, Cash Flow reports and Waterfall, Trend, Portfolio and Benchmark dashboards. All available dashboards provide highly interactive analysis, alerts, KPI’s and rankings by entity, channel, customer, market, or any other dimension available in your Hyperion application. The CXO-Cockpit is available out of the box delivering the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.

About the CXO-Cockpit Community: CXO Solutions delivers the CXO-Cockpit in a concept of co-creation. Its development is based on the best practices approach derived from the CXO-Cockpit Community. The CXO-Cockpit Community is a network of CFO’s, finance professionals from large organizations and University professors sharing their best practices for presentation of financial data. The Community ultimately drives the further development of the CXO-Cockpit.

The next 2 days we spent on the top of the mountain acclimatizing and fearing the day that would have to put our physical and mental fitness to the test on this 14KM long clime for multiple times on the same day. Being on the mountain we also took the time to attend some of the specific sessions that were organized by the Alpe DuZes organization. These sessions made us aware why we were all on the mountain that day and what would happen with the money that was raised. These presentations, mostly presented by cancer or ex-cancer patients and researchers were extremely impressing and inspiring.

We all came to the conclusion that it is really incredible what this foundation has put together with the Alpe DuZes event. The combination of dealing with cancer, raising money to cure and control this disease and cycling is a very strong formula.

After spending 2 days on the mountain we knew the next day it was D-day for all of us. Our adventure truly started on 04:30 on the 9th when our team passed the starting line to commence our first ascent.
Fortunately the weather was good for cycling on the 9th because the days prior to the event the weather was very foggy, cold and wet. That was not the type of weather for any of us to achieve our personal goal to reach the top 6 times. Fortunately, on the day itself it was dry, partly clouded with little wind. It was however very cold, especially in the descents. Only after about 14:00 the sun came through and we had to change in a different set of clothing.

I guess we can speak on behalf of our whole team that, despite of the fact that we spent over 10 hours on the bike, we all thoroughly enjoyed this day. Especially the first climb was very special. It was pitch black around us when the road beneath you all of a sudden starts to climb. You cannot see it but you feel it. All you can do is switch to the smallest gear and survive. All is dark and silent except for each other breathing and the rattling of chains and gears. Furthermore, all of the 21 turns were lid by hundreds of candles that people had put there in memory of their loved ones. It was very special to pass these turns in the dark.

It was tough and at some point to a lot of things (knees, lower back, shoulders etc) start hurting, but luckily everybody made it through the day. For most of us the trick was to really divide your energy, and to make sure your heart rate stayed within a certain threshold all day long. All other KPIs, which are normally really valuable like speed, average speed, distance, time, altitude do not matter anymore. You just have to keep on going. All in all most of us spend more than 10 hours on the saddle that day.

A manner of survival was also to count the turns. Turn 21, 16, 13, 10, 7 and 3 were important landmarks. In many of these turns and all along the climb many spectators were cheering us forward there ongoing support really made life a bit easier.

After the last turn it was great to enter Alpe Du’Hez itself because you know you almost have finished one more climb. Especially the first part in Alpe DuZes was really great. Very loud music, lots of people and the first piece of road where after + / – 13 km of non-stop climbing you momentarily go down. Only 1 kilometer to go to the finish where hundreds of people were cheering for you and the 4300 other cyclist that day!!

Finally, we are really happy to have participated Alpe DuZes 2011 and we are proud to have shared the Alpe DuZes 2011 experience with so many other people that day. Training and willpower are things you need on a day like this and willpower is something we most definitely shared with the many cancer patients we have seen during this week.

Despite that, we have heard a lot of comments that (because of the standard templates) we are not so flexible. However, we were (and still are) convinced that these comments about “inflexibility” are partly due to the lack of knowledge about the true abilities of the CXO-Cockpit. With the existing standard templates we are able to cover over 95% of all Reporting requirements of Hyperion customers, but with the creation of our Free Style Template it is much easier for us to explain that we now have 100% flexible reporting options within the CXO-Cockpit.

With our 4.1 version in place we are 100% sure that we can meet any specific Hyperion reporting requirement. A good example is this Bridge Report.

If you have any additional questions please let us know.