Hyperion Solutions, a business analytics software company which focuses on enterprise corporations, is hunting for more partners.
“”Our stated goal is to increase the amount of revenue from channels to a higher proportion”” of income, said Srikant Gokulnatha, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s director
of product marketing.
Currently about 27 per cent of revenue comes from resellers, which the company wants to boost to at least one-third.
“”That means we need to recruit more partners.””
Hyperion recently hired a new vice-president for channels, he noted, part of an effort to increase the channel team for finding new resellers. In addition, it is increasing partner sales and technical training.
He made the statement in an interview about the recent new product releases, including Essbase 7.1, Data Integration Connector for SAP BW, and Profitability Management, an analytics suite.
The move to expand partners is a change for Hyperion, which has only 600 VARs around the world, including international majors such as IBM Global Service, CGI, Accenture and BearingPoint.
Competitors in the business intelligence market (sometimes called business performance management) include Ottawa’s Cognos Inc.
However a Toronto VAR shrugged off word that Hyperion wants more resellers.
“”They’ve always said that,”” said David Rose, a founding partner of Iconomics, a Hyperion consultancy. “”It’s not a revelation to me.””
He also cautioned that the company won’t be going for a mass market approach. “”They’re always picky about who they want as partners,”” he said.
While in the U.S. there may be room for Hyperion to add VARs, he said, the smaller Canadian market is tight for its products.
“”Their in-house sales people and ourselves as resellers step over each other’s toes.””
Half-dozen small resellers
Terry Furlong, Hyperion’s director of sales for Canada, estimated the company has only about a half-dozen resellers in this country outside the major consulting firms.
What the company is looking for here are VARs who work in areas as data warehousing, retail analysis and customer profitability analysis. “”Partners that have expertise in those areas would be of high interest to us,”” he said.
Among the ways it is trying to find new resellers is launching relationships with other software manufacturers such as Teradata, and speaking to customers about partners they work with.
Essbase 7.1, released during the summer, is touted by the company as being an online analytic processing application (OLAP) that can do both financial and operational analysis for business that has usually required different applications.
OLAP software crunches masses of data to give companies a better understanding of everything from financial to supply chain information. Essbase 7x has a new visualization front end which Hyperion says lets users quickly build charts and graphs to better compare query results.
“”It lets our partners provide their customers with a more compelling business application to address business needs,”” said Gokulnatha.
Business suite
Other new products include Profitability Management, the first of a series of Essbase front-end that combine sbusiness content from ISVs to make suites targeted at verticals or specific business problems.
Profitability Management’s data mining capabilities are supposed to help companies find which customers are profitable, reveal purchasing behaviour and the costs of acquiring new customers.
Rose said it could be a “”logical upsell”” for Essbase users who want more sophisticated data analysis.