Wind River Holdings Comes Together in the Cloud With Host Analytics

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 29, 2013) - Host Analytics, the leader in cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), today announced that Wind River Holdings®, L.P., a privately owned investment group based in King of Prussia, PA, has deployed Host Analytics Close Management Cloud and is in final parallel testing in anticipation of turning off its legacy on-premises Hyperion Enterprise application in January 2014. The move will allow Wind River to reduce their dependence on internal IT resources while driving greater accountability and consistency across its businesses.

For nearly a hundred years, Wind River has selectively acquired businesses in a variety of industries for its diverse portfolio including manufacturing, franchising, facility management services, real estate, and financial services as well as a variety of alternative investments. Wind River's proprietary Strategic Architecture Process provides its operating companies with strategic direction, management support, and access to capital -- all with the goal of creating sustainable long-term growth.

At the holding company level, in order to effectively serve the shareholders' consolidated reporting needs, Wind River has to gather financial information from a wide range of ERP systems, including Microsoft Dynamics SL, SysPro, Microsoft Dynamics GP, JD Edwards, Epicor, and others. Prior to Host Analytics, it was hard for management to quickly get a global view of its businesses, relying on Hyperion Enterprise, spreadsheets, and ERP extracts that were manually integrated to produce a consolidated financial view. Beyond that, it was difficult to maintain and evolve the company's deployment of Hyperion Enterprise given the deep skill-set required, creating an excessive dependency on scarce IT resources. Host Analytics now integrates directly with all of Wind River's ERP systems and the Finance team can manage the EPM applications themselves.

At the operating company level, Host Analytics is also configured to be the primary reporting vehicle for communicating financial results of the individual businesses to operating company management as well as Wind River. In contrast to the awkward and less flexible native reporting capabilities of the various ERP systems, Host Analytics serves as a user-friendly business reporting environment. Host Analytics also serves as an analytical tool for Wind River, facilitating the manipulation of general ledger output to identify the answers to questions posed on the financial results. 

"We have a fairly complex accounting situation here given our mixed bag of industries, geographic locations, and ERP systems, as well as tax and legal strategies," said Paul Peterson, Controller at Wind River. "We needed a flexible, centralized solution and the more we heard about the Cloud, the more sense it made. Host Analytics helped us upgrade our processes, make ourselves more agile as our business grows, and implement a system that we can evolve and support within the Finance team."

"We're finding that companies looking to replace Hyperion applications see Host Analytics as a natural evolution," said Ron Baden, vice president of Services at Host Analytics. "Much of the business logic applied to reporting activities by finance personnel is the same, with the added benefits of enhanced functionality and considerably lighter maintenance burden." 

To learn more about Host Analytics Hyperion Migration Program, please visit: http://ow.ly/m9Muc

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About Host Analytics, Inc.
Host Analytics is the leader in cloud-based financial applications for planning, close management, reporting, and analytics. Host Analytics Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) customers benefit from improved business agility, lower total cost of ownership, faster time to value, increased security, and a faster pace of innovation compared to traditional on-premises alternatives. World-class companies like NEC, Burlington Coat Factory, and Sanmina trust Host Analytics to power their strategic financial processes. Host Analytics is a fast-growing, private company backed by leading venture capitalists and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices around the globe.

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