What is Hyperion Planning?
Hyperion Planning is in essence a web front end for budgeting / forecasting / modeling in essbase. I repeat, essbase is the back end for Hyperion Planning. While many of us were custom coding essbase / excel to perform these tasks, Hyperion Planning has finally made it to the stage of an application. Everything is driven by using the mouse from making web forms to assigning security. The real power of essbase is still there (calc scripts) through the use of business rules. Business rules are really powerful in that they can accept parameters at run time from a web form. Anything that is a dropdown can be fed into a business rule (modified calc script). This means that through proper design you can build an enterprise wide budgeting solution with only using a handful of business rules (3 or 4). Hyperion Planning has gone through some major transformations in terms of stability. The current version is System 9.3.1 p1. While the install still includes ~3 servers and probably ~15 services,
