Oracle to Buy Hyperion for $3.3 Billion

Oolala submitted an article that opens: "Business software maker Oracle Corp. will buy Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash, renewing a shopping spree aimed at toppling rival SAP AG. The deal announced Thursday will give Oracle an arsenal of Hyperion products that are widely used by SAP's customers. Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software, help chief financial officers and other top corporate executives track their company's performance."

Tracker.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software, help chief financial officers and other top corporate executives track their company's performance.""

That use to be called...the stock market.

Re:Buzzword alert

[SashaMan]

Not really. Actually, it's more accurate to say a relational database is like an excel spreadsheet and "business intelligence" (which really means OLAP, on-line analytical processing) software is like pivot tables. The difference is that modern databases and OLAP systems can support billions of rows and access from thousands of users, an Excel spreadsheet not so much.

To give more context, Hyperion (or, more accurately, a company Hyperion bought a while back) basically invented OLAP with Essbase. This is a hugely important deal in enterprise software. Lots of companies use Oracle for their transactional data (i.e. sales data, purchasing data, etc), to support huge data volumes, but Oracle's homegrown OLAP products to analyze this data are generally poorly received in the marketplace. Hyperion is one of the standard bearers of this type of software.

Don't forget the Microsoft factor

[swinte]

This can also be seen as a response to Microsoft's recent purchase of ProClarity (makers of front-end software for the Microsoft BI products). Both Microsoft and Oracle are gobbling up companies that fill gaps in their offerings to allow them to sell an entire BI solution instead of just widgets that other companies assemble into complete solutions.

Re:Don't forget the Microsoft factor

[Anonymous Coward]

I've wondered if ProClarity was named to one-up Clarity, a plug-in reporting tool for Hyperion Essbase?

Actually, it's even weirder. Hyperion recently announced a partnership with Microsoft. Wonder what acquisition by a mortal blood enemy is going to do to that deal?

And this does hurt Microsoft. Their attempt at OLAP - after years of development, tractor trailers of cash, and free distribution - still sucks. As in two orders of magnitude slower than Essbase. Not to mention zero (OK, I exaggerate, probably like one or two percent) of the built-in functions of the Hyperion suite. And partnering with Microsoft is often a kiss-of-death, knife-in-the-back kind of thing. (Stac, HotMail)

Bizzarly enough, a couple of months back, I read a white paper where a number of analysts were predicting Oracle might scoop up Business Objects. Which is funny because - while BO is competition to Hyperion - BO is not actually OLAP. Just a lot more glossy.

This is probably going to end up as a good deal for Hyperion. Influx of money, and partnered with a software company that does a good (glossy) interface - probably the single biggest weakness of Hyperion (despite the acquisition of Brio (now Hyperion Intelligence Explorer) a couple of years back. Microsoft has always stomped other companies by focusing on style over substance. Oracle has got the product and money to compete on the style front, Hyperion has a product that leaves Microsoft in the dust. I'd really like to believe the combination of the two will be enough.

I didn't like the trend Hyperion was showing - going towards a Windows only, Microsoft SQL server only product. Hyperion should remain cross-platform, and support multiple databases.

Disclaimer. I work with Hyperion. The end product is really nice, from a user perspective. For databases supporting a multi-billion dollar company, response time is measured in seconds. We crank out tens of thousands of reports, customized for each recipient. People can (and do) play with the databases through Brio dashboards and through Excel. But, OMFG, the developer tools have a long long way to go. (

Re:Nasty!

[Zardoz44]

There is no Crystal Reports company anymore. They were bought by another BI vendor called Business Objects. They might get bought by someone soon, but probably not by Apple.