Essbase focus and strenght is in the information management space, not in predictive analytics and data mining.
The top players (and expensive ones) in this space are SAS (with Enterprise Miner & Enteprise Guide combination) and IBM with SPSS.
Microsoft SSAS (Analysis Services) is a lot less expensive (it's included with some SQL Server versions) and has good Data Mining capabilities but is more limited in the OR (operations research) and Econometrics/Statistics space.
Also, you could use R, an open source alternative, that is increasing its popularity and capabilities over time, for example some strong BI players (SAP, Microstrategy, Tableau, etc.) are developing R integration for predictive analytics and data mining.