Tod Nestor, CFO and senior vice president of finance at The Penn Traffic Co., a Syracuse, N.Y.-based regional grocery retailer, says his $1 billion company decided last year it needed to undergo a strategic consolidation, focusing on "what we do best." A decision was made to divest its wholesale and bakery operations, leaving just the retail unit, which operates supermarkets in the northeastern U.S. Instead of hiring an investment bank to work out the pricing, Nestor turned to Oracle Corp.'s Hyperion Strategic Finance application.

"HSF allowed us to easily value our wholesale business so we could make sure it made sense to sell it, to determine the right price, and to see how we could use the proceeds," he says. In the end, with the help of HSF, "we successfully executed a sale of the unit after the market crashed, at the price we had established before the market crashed," he says.

Penn Traffic was using the last generation of HSF. Nestor is excited about the upgrade Oracle released recently, HSF R11, which he says will significantly enhance the modeling capability.