Hyperion has updated its business intelligence (BI) products, building in features gained with the acquisition of Brio last October and adding deeper support for Linux and business performance management capabilities.

The new releases include version 7 of Hyperion's Essbase developer environment and version 8.2 of its Performance Suite, which includes the Brio-derived Intelligence and SQR components for reporting and dashboard controls.

Hyperion has also extended support for Red Hat Linux. "We have offered it at different layers, but now we support it at every level," said Hyperion marketing manager Nigel Youell.

Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at analyst Gartner, said, "If you look at Linux support, a number of vendors have announced end-to-end support for it, but never played this out. Hyperion is the first to actually do it."

Essbase 7, the latest version of Hyperion's Olap engine for developers, now contains capabilities for predictive analytics and alerts and triggers for when supply or demand miss preset targets.

Performance Suite 8.2 contains tools for creating dashboards that can be delivered to employees' desktops. It also includes cross-platform web services integration and security support based on the XML for Analysis (XMLA) specification it co-sponsored with Microsoft for cross-platform exchange of analytics data.

The components inherited from the Brio acquisition include drag-and-drop and customisable functionality with data querying or reporting through support of the MDX query language. Unicode support enables developers to extend analysis capabilities beyond the financial areas of a business to customer, product and market trend views.