Oracle EPM 11.1 (aka Hyperion System 9.5) Now Available for Download

Edward Roske over at the Look Smarter blog recently picked up on the release of the new Oracle EPM System 11.1 over at edelivery.oracle.com. Edward notes that this release is initially Windows only and includes improvements to Essbase an a new integrated Essbase development IDE called Essbase Studio.

For me this is potentially a very interesting release as firstly, Essbase Studio should support creating Essbase cubes directly from the OBIEE semantic model (this should also have worked in the 9x release, but the ODBC driver that OBIEE uses didn't seem to work properly with EIS), and secondly, it should be possible in a supported way to embed OBIEE dashboards in the Hyperion Workspace product, as per the screenshot below.

I've also heard talk about SmartView also from this release supporting OBIEE as a data source, which will certainly be interesting both in terms of being another OBIEE/Essbase integration point and because it brings more features to the table than the existing OBIEE office plug-in. Anyway, I downloaded the software over the weekend and I may well give it a work through on the flight back to the UK on the Friday (I'm over in Washington D.C. this week), if I manage to get anywhere I'll no doubt post it on the blog soon afterwards.