February 21, 2010

Star Finance Command Center Meets the iPhone

This past week, I got to play with one of the coolest iPhone apps I've seen in a long time. Why is it cool? Because to the best of my knowledge, it's the first generally available, Hyperion-centric application for the iPhone. Well, technically it's a web app that's optimized for viewing on smartphones, but it has all the look-and-feel of an iPhone app.

Sometime soon, Star Analytics is going to be releasing the newest version of their Star Finance Command Center and it's targeted for smart phones (UPDATE: press release is now out). Here's a shot of an iPhone taken with an iPhone (meta, I know) showing the new Star app:

For those of you who are not familiar with Star's Finance Command Center, I encourage you to check out their website (and don't confuse it with Star Integration Server). Suffice to say, it lets you manage all of your financial processes and data flows whether they're from a general ledger, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Essbase, a relational database or just about any other data source you can imagine. Until recently, you had to be sitting at a desktop to manage your processes, but the newest release should change all that.

In the interest of full disclosure, I got such a kick out of Star's smartphone app that I did agree to be quoted in their press release when it eventually comes out. I'm not being compensated for it: I just think that it's a really cool product and I can't wait to get it in the hands of all the finance departments I know. (I suppose that since I'm breaking the story of the app here before the press release comes out, it's possible that this will be the last press release Star Analytics ever asks me to participate in.)

I did manage to talk one of the developers into giving me a cleaned up picture since I know my pic above is a bit amateurish:

Finance Process Management?
Yes, there's finally a web app for that.

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