HYPERION INTRODUCES PROFITABILITY MANAGEMENT

Tue, 5 Oct 2004

HYPERION INTRODUCES PROFITABILITY MANAGEMENT

TO HELP ORGANISATIONS DISCOVER TRUE VALUE OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

First End-to-End Analytic Solution for Profitability Allows Organisations to Understand the Most and Least Profitable Customers, Products and Channels

Sydney, October 5, 2004: Hyperion (Nasdaq: HYSL), the global leader in Business Performance Management software, has announced the availability of Profitability Management from Hyperion, the first end-to-end analytic solution for managing customer profitability. Profitability Management from Hyperion helps companies solve one of today's most pressing business problems-understanding and analysing the most and least profitable customers, products regions and channels-while arming managers with the information they need to act upon this information. Profitability Management is the first in a series of integrated business solutions that Hyperion plans to introduce to the market.

"Our customers have relied on Hyperion's technology to do profitability analysis for years," said Russell Evans, Managing Director, Australia & New Zealand, Hyperion Solutions . "Now, Hyperion is combining that technology with best practices, methodologies and services to make it even easier for customers to meet the growing business demands for analysing and understanding profitability at a granular level."

Profitability Management uses reports and dashboards, advanced analytics, as well as allocations and operational models to help businesses quickly analyse, understand and manage key profitability information, including:

* which customers are profitable or unprofitable * the margin contribution of each product * specific customer purchasing behaviours * the costs to acquire new customers * the potential profitability from a prospect over time * which channels, products & regions are most profitable

Profitability Management from Hyperion provides organisations' IT departments with a complete solution that includes a single place to house information from multiple sources. With built-in data mining that identifies customer behaviours, and powerful calculations that assign direct and indirect costs, Profitability Management from Hyperion makes it easy to view multidimensional analysis results through easy-to-use query, reporting and dashboards solutions.

Proven Four-Step Methodology

Profitability Management from Hyperion delivers best practices through a proven four-step methodology and enterprise software and professional services offering.

This integrated four-step methodology within Profitability Management from Hyperion enables companies to:

1. Understand revenue and cost drivers through detailed reports, dashboards and multidimensional analysis that integrate multiple sources of information into a single view

2. Segment their customer base through advanced analytics to identify high value customers and behaviours and to trend and predict future customer and product behaviours

3. Analyse the costs to serve through complex allocations and operational models that estimate costs based on business rules and activity-based costing models

4. Test and execute new strategies by monitoring, validating and improving areas such as operations, pricing models, profit centres and product mixes by testing various scenarios.

"Many customer and product profitability analyses historically have had little choice but to include potentially faulty place-holder assumptions in the place of finer-grained cost inputs," said Mark Beyer, senior program director at META Group, a leading provider of IT research, advisory services and strategic consulting. "Larger amounts of detail exist in operational systems than five or even three years ago, and that detail can be used to replace many of those assumptions.

"It is important for analytic solutions to use actual values to replace assumptions in profitability models wherever possible. Solutions using actual data greatly improve profitability analysis, and those that can move easily between summary-level inputs and the supporting cost details increase solution flexibility and enhance the verification of analytic results."

Integration with Hyperion Essbase 7X

Profitability Management from Hyperion is designed to take advantage of the new Hyperion Essbase 7X, also announced recently. The newest version of Hyperion Essbase delivers more powerful analytic capabilities that make even the most complex profitability analysis scenarios faster and more comprehensive. With Hyperion Essbase 7X, users can rely on a single real-time analytic architecture to meet the scalability and response-time needs of sales, marketing, human resources and supply chain applications, and the complex analytic requirements of finance.

About Hyperion

Hyperion is the global leader in Business Performance Management software. More than 9,000 customers - including 91 of the Fortune 100 - rely on Hyperion software to translate strategies into plans, monitor execution and provide insight to improve financial and operational performance. Hyperion combines the most complete set of interoperable applications with the leading Business Intelligence platform to support and create Business Performance Management solutions. A network of more than 600 partners provides the company's innovative and specialised solutions and services.

Named one of the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For 2004, Hyperion employs approximately 2,500 people in 20 countries. Distributors represent Hyperion in an additional 25 countries. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Hyperion generated annual revenues of $622 million for the 12 months that ended June 30, 2004. Hyperion is traded under the Nasdaq symbol HYSL.

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Safe Harbor Statement

Statements in this press release other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements concerning the potential success of anticipated product features, the anticipated product offerings and the potential market opportunities for business performance management software. Such statements constitute anticipated outcomes and do not assure results. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated by the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors, including, but not limited to the company's ability to retain and attract key employees, the successful and timely development of new products, the impact of competitive products and pricing, customer demand, and technological shifts.

For a more detailed discussion of factors that could affect the company's performance and cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, interested parties should review the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Report on Form 10-K filed on September 13, 2004. The company does not undertake an obligation to update its forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

"Hyperion," the Hyperion "H" logo and Hyperion's product names are trademarks of Hyperion. References to other companies and their products use trademarks owned by the respective companies and are for reference purpose only.

ENDS

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