The SAS Institute Inc, Cary, North Carolina is lining itself up to give the likes of Hyperion Software Corp a run for its money in the financial consolidation market. The company’s SAS Business Solution for Financial Consolidation & Reporting is in its final developer testing stages, and is due to be launched next month, SAS says. The product consolidates data from disparate, often multi-vendor accounts ledgers, and provides multi-dimensional analytical processing tools to enable complex analysis of accounts data. It has an integrated financial data warehouse and on-line analytical processing software, which enables the financial executive to slice and dice financial data to look at the consolidated figures in whichever way is required, as well as ‘what if’ analysis to look at the financial implications of proposed management changes. The reporting facility caters for both pre-defined and ad hoc reports, as well as on-screen multidimensional views of data. The system can be used independently, or integrated with any other SAS Institute products, such as the executive information system. The Financial Consolidation & Reporting system can be used by companies using more than one brand of transactional ledger system, or those with a single brand that are dissatisfied with their current financial analysis and reporting capabilities, SAS says. Although the company is claiming its system will be the only one that both consolidates financial data and enables multi-dimensional analysis of the data, Hyperion vehemently disputes this claim. Hyperion, formerly IMRS Inc (CI No 2,609), which claims 85% share of the consolidation market, says it has had multi-dimensional analysis tools for some time. Last December, it licensed the rights to the TM1 Software Corp – formerly Sinper Corp – TM1 analytical processing engine (CI No 2,912), and built a custom-made financial package on top of it, which does not use pre-calculations like many systems, but performs real time dynamic calculations. Judith Rothrock, Hyperion’s vice-president of marketing, said she was not surprised at SAS entering the consolidation market. She was only surprised it had taken so long for others to begin to compete with Hyperion. However Hyperion is now on release 4.0 of its Enterprise financial management software, and Rothrock said she was not afraid of the competition. Industry analysts at Morgan Stanley & Co said they did not expect SAS to match Hyperion’s functionality, but they wouldn’t be surprised if SAS shakes up the consolidation market a bit.
