This will let us add descriptive dimensions to things like 'customer' without exploding the size of the cube, said Judy Isaacson, a finance manager at Sea-Land Service Inc., which now has about 300 users accessing Essbase 6 via Java clients. She expects the wider distribution of data will also make the application more useful to sales and marketing users. The ocean freight company, which ships 30,000 containers per week on 99 ships, is using Essbase to determine the costs associated with every container it transports. Typically, this data is studied in conjunction with demographic and other data. Essbase 6 includes a variety of new statistical functions, and linking multiple data cubes, around this kind of analysis.
Pricing has yet to be set.