Oracle Hyperion Planning VS IBM Cognos TM1 Series - Part 1 (aka Introduction)

This is the first post of my Hyperion Planning VS Cognos TM1 series for EPM enthusiasts, the series will talk about key highlights and differences between technologies, compare both products by showing how things are done, whether we want to create a dimension, cube or simply load data. I'm focusing on the technology bit in these posts because 1+1 = 2 using a calculator or Excel :)

Now whether you are from Hyperion Planning or Cognos TM1 background the following  will help you align terminologies and map product components. I will list down the Hyperion components and map it to the equivalent TM1 component, the beautiful part here is that the relationship can be one to many or one to none.

Essbase server/ Administration Console

• TM1 Architect
• TM1 Performance Modeler
• TM1 Turbo Integrator

Hyperion Planning

• TM1 Architect
• TM1 Performance Modeler
• TM1 Web
• TM1 Perspectives
• TM1 Turbo Integrator

Hyperion Workspace

• TM1 Architect
• TM1 Performance Modeler
• TM1 Web

Hyperion Calculation Manager

• TM1 Architect
• TM1 Performance Modeler
• TM1 Turbo Integrator

Hyperion SmartView

• TM1 Perspectives
• CAFE (Cognos Analysis For Excel)

Hyperion Financial Reporting

• TM1 Perspectives
• CAFE
• Cognos Insight

Hyperion Shared Services (Users and Groups)

• TM1 Architect
• TM1 Performance Modeler
• ET LDAP (utility to upload LDAP users to TM1, this will ONLY create new users)

Hyperion Shared Services (Lifecycle Management)

No TM1 equivalent, batch files to copy data directories will do the job

EPM System Configuration

• Cognos Configuration

Hi Hyperion this is TM1,,,, TM1 this is Hyperion :)

Now we are done with the introduction.

So now we have mapped our products and components let us look at the services in our servers and see how they look.

Hyperion Planning

Nothing unusual here, we have a service running on for almost every product/component name.

Cognos TM1

First time I looked at the services in TM1 I was like mmm interesting, its pretty simple really you must have Admin Server and Application server services up and running, the rest are all applications (called application servers in TM1). In case you are wondering why are we having a service for every application? well it has to do with  TM1 architecture and the way TM1 handles data, this will be covered in details in a future post.

Next post I'll discuss  high-level architecture, key differences and take it from there until we end up with our own sample applications in both Hyperion  and  TM1.

Until we meet again, may the Cosmos be with you