Kepion Solution vs. The Rest. A Comparison White Paper

Transcription

1 Kepion Solution vs. The Rest A Comparison White Paper

2 In the Business Intelligence industry, Kepion competes everyday with BI vendors such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion and SAP BusinessObjects. At first look, it would seem that companies today can use either Kepion Solution or any other BI vendor to support their planning, budgeting and forecasting needs. However throughout implementation and maintenance of BI applications, companies are realizing through experience, the significant differences in BI capabilities between Kepion and the less robust and less integrated BI technologies from IBM, Oracle and SAP. Kepion s software architecture is completely organically grown to deliver superior performance, scalability, usability, efficiency and reliability, all of which impacts the total cost of ownership, user adoption, and ultimately the success of the BI project. This document discusses in detail the key differences between Kepion Solution and the rest. 1. Deliver More BI with Less IT Effort Kepion technology requires far fewer IT personnel for a given BI project due to its reusable metadata which allows easier maintenance and less redundancy of the environment. End users are empowered with more self-service capabilities to offload the work from the IT staff by providing an entirely web-enabled suite of administrative tools that business users can manage. The metadata within IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion and SAP Business Objects platforms cannot be reused across forms & reports, which cause unnecessary maintenance. End users of these systems have limited self-service capabilities and are heavily dependent on IT, requiring more IT administrators and developers. Administrators have fewer tools to manage the BI applications, thus requiring more administrators per number of end users. Minimized Deployment Effort Self-Guided Form & Report Authoring Experience empowers the business user. Automatic cell-level data security that reduces IT administration effort. Central Administration Environment Reusable business logic across the entire platform reduces redundancy of metadata. Browser Agnostic with zero-footprint Web eliminates client installation costs. Single web-interface and application environment for administration and deployments.

3 2. All users on a Single Platform Kepion enables a single version of the truth by unifying all BI functions on a single platform. Kepion users will able to access their information through the Web, Microsoft Office and Enterprise Portals. Common with large vendors such as IBM, Oracle and SAP is a series of acquisitions for establishing a BI platform that results in multiple stand alone Studios and platforms for each style of BI. This complicates usability, integration and administration, which leads to multiple versions of the truth. Unified BI Architecture Truly self-service web interface Single point of installation and upgrades. Kepion Solution requires minimal configuration steps and no desktop client install. A single server with fewer moving parts and processes translates into less downtime. Kepion allows business users to rapidly create, manipulate, format, and analyze any form or report themselves. Individual columns and rows on a grid can be selected quickly and users can easily format, drill, and perform other tasks on-the-fly. Seamless integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010 Users are able to access forms and reports through the web and Microsoft Office applications. Reports and charts are interactive through view of Share- Point and other Enterprise portal environments.

4 3. Fast and Intuitive User Experience Kepion s web user interface adopts many familiar paradigms for most Microsoft Excel users. Kepion provides the only true online spreadsheet environment for users to work in. Kepion s web interface is built entirely in Microsoft Silverlight where processing is shifted from the Web server to the Web browser, making for a more responsive web interface that increases user productivity and improves user adoption. Kepion is powered by Microsoft Silverlight Technology to bring rich functionalities of Excel to the web. Users will have a familiar spreadsheet workspace for them to effectively complete their tasks. Users of IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion and SAP Business Objects are forced to learn different end user tool interfaces which lack consistency in functional paradigms. Inconsistent user interfaces increase training requirements and decrease user adoption for BI applications that require a combination of BI styles. User Friendly Interface Familiar Excel-like environment enables quick adoption of the solution. Kepion's spreadsheet environment enables more productivity over the web. Kepion enables collaboration via comments that can be added to each form or workflow process to provide instructions to other users of the system. Instant Response to User Actions Dynamic Form/Report Personalization With smart-search filtering, users navigate to their forms and reports quicker with minimal clickthrough. Kepion allows each user excel-like formatting capabilities to save custom styles and additions to the row & column headers.

5 4. High Performance on any scale Kepion s high performance at any scale is possible given its intelligent use of both MOLAP and ROLAP architecture which leverages the database for much of its processing. Data joins and analytics calculations are processed in the database whenever possible. Kepion s proactive caching allows quick response time when conducting what-if analysis on planning and forecast data. Most of the top 3 vendor solutions (IBM, Oracle, SAP) do not have scalable ROLAP across the product set, therefore forces many calculations to be performed on the desktop or on the middle-tier server resulting in poor performance. The inability to leverage the database to the fullest extent results in unnecessary network and hardware resource utilization. Quick Response Time SQL-level Business Rules allow for high performing calculations to be performed without overburdening the middle-tier servers. Pro-active Caching of data enables quick what-if analysis for users to view upon each change. Built on the stability and enterprise-level security of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Analysis Server. Fully scalable enterprise solution that lets companies start with a small deployment before scaling to hundreds or thousands of users. High Performance ROLAP Engine Scalable to multiple OLAP servers to maintain optimal performance, thus handling large number of concurrent user access. 5. Flexible technology for Departmental to Enterprise BI Kepion s metadata reusability and workflow management tools, such as Kepion Modeler, enable departments to incrementally migrate their business logic into a consolidated enterprise BI environment. Cognos, Hyperion or BusinessObjects do not have an effective tool equivalent to Kepion Modeler to aid in consolidating and reconciling disparate departmental BI applications into enterprise BI. Seamless Migration from Departmental to Enterprise BI Kepion Modeler can consolidate disparate departmental BI applications while reconciling all overlaps or conflicts that may arise. Kepion s models, rules, forms/reports and dimensions can be quickly migrated into a consolidated BI environment with automated extractors & loaders.

6 6. Quick to implement and deploy, easy to maintain and administer Kepion provides organizations a platform that is quick to implement and deploy, easy to maintain and administer and fueled by a single code base that offers the advantage of reusable business logic across the entire platform. Kepion s single BI server provides efficient, centralized administration for IT and fewer moving parts which translate into less downtime. Due to the nature of disparate source codes of large vendor solutions (IBM, Oracle, SAP), the roadmap for integration between each component is still in progress. These vendor solutions do not provide equivalent tools such as the Kepion Modeler to help manage and fine-tune BI applications from a single and centralized point of administration. Enterprise-Caliber Administration Reusable and Rich Metadata Layer Industrial-Strength Multi-level Security Kepion s centralized administration provides a single console for real-time user and system management. Consistent and guided web-interface also enables business users to be less reliable of IT for form authoring, publishing and administration tasks. Kepion s single code base offers reusable business logic across the entire platform from management reports to planning forms. Kepion provides a zero-footprint Web interface to manage reusable setup for platform-wide cell-level data security. Same form/report can yield different views of information based on user profile. User profile determines appropriate level of functionality.

7 Kepion Solution Industrial-Strength Technology Kepion is a next generation solution that allows companies to support all types of BI applications with one technology. The Kepion solution is built to extend the boundaries of performance, scalability and efficiency of enterprise BI. At the same time, Kepion brings that same caliber of BI technology to smaller departmental initiatives. Kepion provides a smooth migration path from departmental BI into a cohesive and consistent enterprise-wide framework. Unlike BI suites offered by other vendors, Kepion offers the only organically grown BI architecture. All of the Kepion Solution components were expressly built to work within a unified architecture and not as separate standalone products or acquired technologies that were subsequently joined together. This caliber of BI technology is now being sought after by companies, not solely just for their most demanding BI applications, but for the purpose of hosting all of their BI applications. Today, companies can standardize all BI onto a single, highly-functional, and efficient architecture, and reap significant economies of scale and enterprise-wide consistency.

8 About Kepion Headquarted in Seattle, WA, Kepion ( is the leading provider of nextgeneration planning, budgeting and forecast solutions for mid to large size enterprises. Kepion is built on the Microsoft BI platform powered by SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services. Kepion provides an entirely web-based planning solution founded on the principle "Simply Flexible: Providing simple access & navigation to your needed information, combined with a fully flexible platform to build solutions that fit around your key business functions" Kepion Corporation. All rights reserved. Kepion Planning Solution is either registered trademarks or trademarks of Kepion Corporation. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.