I’m proud to announce the official production release of cubeSavvy 6.0.0. Almost four months in beta status has resulted in a battle-hardened, reliable product. I’d like to thank everyone who tested and provided feedback and/or suggestions. It was a tremendous help and I couldn’t have done it without you!
As I mentioned at Kscope, I will be charging a licensing fee for cubeSavvy. I know this goes somewhat against the grain in the Oracle EPM space, where free third-party tools abound. In fact, I myself offer the freely-available cubeSavvy Utilities on this website. So why then am I not making cubeSavvy available at no cost? The answer is simple – it’s the only way to determine if it actually provides value to users.
With that in mind, here is the value proposition for cubeSavvy as I see it:
- Web-based. This gives it several inherent advantages over traditional client-server products:
- No need to install on every user’s computer, with all the administrative and technical problems that inevitably entails.
- Works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, UNIX, as well as iOS and Android.
- NONE of the Excel add-in issues inherent in the classic add-in and Smart View, such as:
- Multiple instances of Excel preventing it from loading.
- All manner of registry issues around DLLs.
- Missing Excel menu item.
- Inability to handle large queries. Smart View uses compression, but it’s compressing XML which is already a large, bloated data-transmission format. cubeSavvy is much more efficient.
- Inexplicable Excel crashes. Oracle blames them on Microsoft, who in turn blames them on Oracle.
- You get the best parts of Planning functionality: fixed forms, focused calculations, monitoring of user data input, etc. All without having to deal with Planning’s confusing architecture and tools and the administration nightmares they create. cubeSavvy allows you to just use Essbase without having to deal with Planning’s headaches.
- Price. Save your organization hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Oracle’s listed price for “Planning Plus” is $4,270 per user per year with a minimum of 25 users. That comes out to $106,750, minimum. Compare that to cubeSavvy, which would cost around $3,000 for the same number of users for the first year (and less than $2,000 for subsequent years) – and has no minimum number of users. Your organization is already spending a fortune on Essbase. Make the most of that investment!
- Speed. Most users have reported retrievals are faster than Smart View. Some have even noticed speeds faster than the classic add-in!
- Sharing. cubeSavvy allows users to create ad-hoc grids and share them with other users. No more emailing Excel retrieves or saving them to shared drives.
- Faster development and support. We all have our horror stories with Oracle Support. Many people at Kscope even mentioned that they’ve completely stopped logging SRs, seeing it as an exercise in futility. Being a smaller, more agile company with a more compact, better-architected product allows for much faster response times. For example, during beta testing it wasn’t unusual to turn around major feature requests in less than a week. Bugs were squashed in mere hours, not quarters.
You can download cubeSavvy at the usual place. Try it out for a month with up to 10 users. Why not give it a test-drive given the above value it could bring to your organization?
If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.
Thanks,
Harry
harry.gates@cubeSavvy.com
