back to the main page
Hyperion CTO John Kopcke: “BI Is at a Tipping Point”
John Kopcke, senior vice president, Oracle Business Intelligence and Performance Management Global Business Unit, has more than 30 years of experience with decision support and business intelligence solutions. Previously CTO at Hyperion, Kopcke is the driving force and thought leader behind Oracle’s vision for performance management. In this role, he oversees product marketing, BI, and performance management domain leads and the Crystal Ball (predictive modeling and simulation) global business unit.
Q: What’s your background?
My professional career in software started the year Oracle opened its doors. My entire, 30-plus-year professional life has been focused on the space we now call business intelligence (BI). In fact, when I began, BI solutions were called decision-support systems. I went on to work on client/server and then Web-based BI solutions. I was also involved early on in the development of executive information systems, the precursor to modern-day dashboards. I also helped deliver some of the very first OLAP technologies.
Q: What was your biggest challenge in your role as CTO of Hyperion?
When I joined Hyperion, the challenge was to transform its offerings from a disparate set of tools and capabilities into a single, integrated system. In the process, we built what’s widely considered the premier performance management solution, and at the same time, we moved Hyperion into Gartner’s Leaders quadrant in business intelligence.
Q: What achievement are you most proud of over the course of your career?
I’ve always been the proudest when I see customers successfully using the technology I’ve been lucky enough to work on. It began in the 1980s when Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. The decision-support system I worked on helped the company build the case for the U.S. government bailout that kept the company’s doors open. Seeing customers succeed is still what drives me today.
Q: What are the key competitive advantages of Hyperion’s approach to BI?
The answer to that question has changed dramatically in the last 18 months. A couple of years ago, prospects told me they had a hard time understanding what separated Hyperion from its competitors. But since we released Hyperion System 9, those questions have gone away. We introduced a single-system approach—and one that dramatically simplifies things for business users.
In addition, Hyperion’s analytics engine (Essbase) is recognized as the world’s most powerful BI calculator. Our competition has nothing that compares to it. Oracle data relationship management is also unique in its ability to synchronize BI master data: hierarchies, business dimensions, reporting structures, attributes, and business rules. Nontechnical users can manage change in master data, but IT controls the process and enforces business rules.
Q: You’ve said you believe that BI is at a tipping point in terms of adoption. Please explain why.
I’ve been in this space for 30 years, and this is the first time I’ve seen BI at the top of CIOs’ agendas. They understand that the technological infrastructure is now in place. Just 20 years ago, databases were in their infancy. I still remember when you would walk into an office and see a computer on a lazy Susan, because multiple users were sharing it. Now the BI infrastructure is there.
Rising business pressures have also aligned the stars for BI, including heightened global competition as well as increasing regulatory pressures. Organizations are looking to BI in order to respond positively to these demands.
Maybe most important, BI is now finally able to deliver a context for business intelligence. Let me try to explain what that means. Having BI alone is like sitting in a car and staring at the gauges on the dashboard but finding that you don’t have any brake or gas pedals. Our competitors focus on monitoring, analyzing, and reporting but not on planning and execution. The combination of Hyperion and Oracle takes insight and makes it actionable. We’re not just answering the question “What do we do next?” We’re also answering the question “How do we motivate people to do it and make sure it is successful?”
Continued on the next page
back to the top
|
