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Until a few years ago, Hyperion Solutions was a non-participant in the mainstream business intelligence (BI) market. Its analytical applications and multi-dimensional database system were largely targeted at financial management tasks - budgeting, forecasting, financial roll-up and the like.

That may have been solid and profitable, but it was niche, and back in 2003 it was already very clear that the BI market was consolidating fast and those left standing would not be the specialists but the generalists. Those vendors would boast a broad pool of integrated BI technology that would satisfy the needs of all levels - from sales managers reporting on regional performance to retail analysts slicing and dicing consumer trends.

Hyperion set about responding to those changes with its $142 million acquisition of Brio Technology in October 2003. But just throwing Brio's range of query, analysis and reporting tools into the Hyperion catalogue was never going to be enough. The company decided that if it was going to scale up for the mainstream market then it had to use the integration of the Brio and Hyperion heritages to jump ahead of the competition in key areas.

That two year effort came to fruition in September when the company shipped Hyperion System 9. And the question observers were asking themselves was: Has it been innovative enough to enable it to take on the gorillas of this space - Cognos, Business Objects and Microsoft? Judging from customer plaudits, the answer is a qualified "yes". Says Noel Gorvett, group finance systems manager, at media company, Pearson: "This is a breakthrough offering." He likes the breadth of the BI capability, but, as with others, there are two standout aspects of System 9: The intuitive interface and the underlying integrated application architecture "should make deployment among our users even easier and quicker".

To get there, Hyperion worked closely with industrial design firm, Frog, famed for its work for Apple. In study groups, it took a look at how users worked with the Hyperion interfaces and concluded they needed to go back to the drawing board.

The result is Workspace. Above all, says Rich Clayton, VP of product marketing, it is a "consistent way for people to access, navigate and produce reports" across all Hyperion products. Moreover, it is personalisable at an individual role level.

"One key piece of feedback we had from key customers was that they were spending too much on training," says Clayton. "They said, you can provide all the features you like but the cost I have in deploying this stuff is way too much."

Trying to address that, Frog used the Ajax technology set to build a client interface that delivers a "much more highly interactive experience" than with standard web-based front-ends, says Clayton.

User experience is also enhanced by the fact that the new underlying architecture - Foundation Services - integrates BI technologies and financial management applications into a single system. As such it unifies administration so that users can sign in once and then get access to all the components their role allows. Previously, to work with multiple tools, they would have to shuffle between completely separate software environments.

Those easy-to-use and -learn characteristics will be critical as BI vendors try to expand their audience. Not only do Hyperion's rivals (many of whom have expanded in the other direction by adding financial management applications to their BI core) claim that their suites are now tightly integrated, but they also maintain their products cater to everyone from a novice to a professional analyst.

In coming months, as users start implementing these new suites, which vendors' claims stand up to scrutiny will become very apparent.