Hyperion Solutions announced that elements of its business intelligence product line are now available on the 64-bit Intel Itanium architecture, making Hyperion the latest BI software firm to support the advanced processing framework.

Hyperion's Essbase 7X analytical package and Performance Suite reporting software are available on Itanium 2-based HP Integrity server platforms running the HP-UX 11i and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating environments. Itanium 2 delivers vastly greater capacity than 32-bit processing.

Business intelligence vendors hope to offer customers the ability to handle larger data volumes and more complex and numerous analytical tools through 64-bit processing. Last month Hyperion rival MicroStrategy released a version of its main analytics and reporting platform that supports 64-bit Linux.

Hyperion's Essbase 7X is designed to let companies conduct financial analysis -- traditionally Hyperion's strong suit --as well as analytics on business operations such as marketing efforts and supply chains. Performance Suite running in a 64-bit environment will let organizations produce a higher volume of reports and distribute them through the Web, Hyperion said.