Case Study – Business
Intelligence Migration with
CubePort™
Thomas Fimiani President
Glenn Martini VP Business Development
August 1, 2006
Case Study – Local
Manufacturer, Dallas, TX USA
Business Intelligence Migration
Hyperion Essbase to Microsoft Analysis Services
Compelling Events
Engagement Model
Overall Results
Business Intelligence Migration
Key Goal is to Enable Legacy Knowledge Transfer in Cube Conversion
Migration from Hyperion Essbase 6.5 and Oracle to SQL Server/MSAS
2000 migration, moving to MSAS 2005 next year
CubePort was used for conversion of all (18) cubes
Conservatively represents 36 man-months of effort performed in 6 man-
months
Custom Stored Procedure was developed to do what Hyperion EIS does
- updates the dimension tables from a source Data Warehouse table
Front-end is Temtec Executive Viewer (EV 5), but client is open to other
front-end in the future
Compelling Events
Scalability: Customer had prohibitive huge cube scalability issues
Essbase Limitations: Practical limit on meta-data reached
Cube Size: Huge Amounts of Disk Space & Overhead
Declined Upgrade: Essbase 7X/9 price was too high, ASO Option is an a
la Carte Option for Another $30K
Cost: Total price to upgrade to 7X quoted at $400K
Cube Processing Times: Exponentially Increasing as Meta-Data Added
Accuracy: Issues with Essbase Cubes
Engagement Model
Partnered with a Strategic Integrator who was initially a competitor
Proof of Concept conversion of (3) cubes in (3) days
Convinced the SI that they would be successful by using CubePort
versus their (doomed) manual approach
ExoLogic performed the conversions, developed the Stored Proc
SI performed testing, verification, reports conversion
ExoLogic automatically created cube-design best-practices, optimization,
and production loading scripts
SI also won follow-on MSAS support and additional business
Overall Results – Excellent
Numerical Accuracy Down to the Penny in EVERY Cell (Each Cube Could have Trillions of
Cells)
Migration performed in six (6) months versus thirty-six (36) months
All pre-existing functionality migrated/replicated … all (18) cubes in full production mode
Scalability issues eliminated. More cube granularity room is result.
Microsoft Analysis Services provides much improved capabilities
Many Hundreds of GB’s (1GB to 500GB) reduced to a few MB’s for each MSAS cube
All query times are comparable or better
Cube load and calc/processing times reduced from 2-20 hours down to 5-50 minutes
Allowed Hyperion Essbase licenses to expire … eliminated maintenance costs
Essbase Upgrade Cost $400K versus Migration Cost of $125K over six months
Project exposed logical issues with how Essbase cubes calculates values
Found several Essbase bugs that MSAS presented more accurately
Finance users were not aware of these problems and had been using faulty values for
business decisions
Why Should You Care?
You can boldly bid business where nobody has bid before …
ROI Example – Based on Migration of 50 Essbase Cubes
Example - Perpetually renewing maintenance on existing tools:
200 users x $5000/user/year = $1M per year
Example - CubePort Migration to Microsoft Analysis Services:
One-Time Expense, Unlimited Same-Cube Conversions
50 Essbase cubes x $5000/cube = $250K
200 users x $500/user/year = $100K per year MSAS maintenance (estimated)
1st Year Savings of $750K ($1M/yr minus $250K one-time conversion cost)
2nd Year Savings of $900K ($1M/yr minus $100K maintenance for MSAS)
Why Should You Care?
Enables Business Intelligence (BI) Migration
World’s only automated OLAP to OLAP conversion
software in marketplace
Greatly removes the cost and time barriers to migration
Cube conversion time measured in days – not months or years
Automates a very long, error-prone, manual process
Guarantees repeatability of conversion process
Unlocks captive BI environments
Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
Support teams can use CubePort as a MSAS training tool
Why Should You Care?
Enables Business Intelligence (BI) Replication
Satisfies the requirement for BI environments to coexist
Allows qualification of new environment while existing tools remain
in production … gradual phase-in of new BI tools
Ultra-fast conversion time allows weekly updates
Guarantees repeatability of conversion process
Allows updates to both BI environments in a timely fashion
Data stays current and Users stay satisfied - transparent
Support teams and users allowed a gradual adoption
Data Points
Data Points from Conversion:
ExoLogic Corporate Background
Incorporated in 2002 … Profitable since 2004
CubePort Released in June 2005
Sixteen Company Members, Employees and Contractors
Microsoft Certified Partner and Official Microsoft Vendor
Core Competencies
Business Intelligence
Data Modeling
Analytics
Essbase
Analysis Services
Software Development
Consulting Services
Product Users in North America, Europe, Asia from various Verticals:
Retail
Manufacturing
Oil & Gas
Transportation