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."

in cash?

[piojo]

That's a lot of cash. I wonder how they'll carry it?

Re:

[GFree]

They'll probably just stick the money on Larry Ellison's jet, fly over Hyperion Solutions HQ and dump it into this really big bag with a dollar sign on it. It has to have a dollar sign you know. The number of vertical strike in the middle is discretionary.

And that's how you do high-level business. Or so I hear.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Bob54321]

I'd say they would initially hand over one of those big novelty cheques. They are always good for big amounts of money.

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[just-a-stone]

After a full scan, then they locked Hyperion until the huge transaction is processed. Later on, they'll send a rule based optimizer.

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[QueePWNzor]

They'll just by a bank. They clearly have the revenue. But the cash for the bank purchase...

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[casualsax3]

I thought it was funny.

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.

Buzzword alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software...

"Business intelligence" software is a fancy term for MS Excel spreadsheets.

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[lamasquerade]

More of a term for analysis (or more often, synthesis) of business related data. Data analysis sounds pretty fancy anyway - but it's more often than not a misnomer. Most 'analysis' is really just grouping and trending, and unless you take something out of the data and see the effect you aren't really analysing anything.

Just for interest's sake, analysis means to take apart, while synthesis means to bring together, I think.

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.

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[alxtoth]

So does it mean that Oracle is dropping "Oracle OLAP", after they dropped Oracle Express ? I tried to work with Oracle OLAP, which is quite bad compared to Essbase. Actually Essbase is very good, and it seems as one of "the solutions" for big cubes where MS Analytic services won't scale.

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[wilf]

it's not just Essbase they want. they want Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning as well.

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[knutsdood]

Excellent description. I work with a group of Hyperion consultants and I must say...these people are some of the most intelligent folks I have ever met. OLAP really pushes the limits of conventional computing and I find it fascinating that the Hyperion software really PEGS the spedometer. BI and BPM are growing so fast its hard to keep up the demand...its really a nifty space to be involved with.

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[anomalous cohort]

a company Hyperion bought a while back

Arbor Software

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 term OLAP is not the most technically accurate. Basically, OnLine Analytical Processing is a method that accountants can use to explore ways to better maximize profits or minimize costs within a corporation. Arbor Software realized that the multi-dimensional database technology being researched in various universities at the time would be an effective tool for OLAP.

In a relational database, there are many tables but they are all two dimensional. In a multi-dimensional database,

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[Bastard of Subhumani]

Essbase is an incredibly powerful Multidimensional analysis tool and combined with a powerful predictive analytics engine it can completely redefine how companies do business.

Bah. You missed out "paradigm shift".

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[Bastard of Subhumani]

It's much more than that. It's anything that draws pretty graphs.

Turnabout

[PingXao]

This is interesting coming as it does less than a year after Hyperion's deal to buy the maker of Focus, i.e. info builders, fell through. I wonder what now what will happen to the smaller players. Will they get bought out for a song, or whither and fold? It looks like that market is consolidating to only a few big players.

Think of the beetles!

[jaquio]

That's a lot of beetle snuff!

Nasty!

[DogDude]

Damn, Ballmer and Jobs have got *nothing* on Ellison when it comes to sheer brutality. He's cutting out SAP's legs from under them by buying up and shutting down (or converting or Oracle optimized... same thing) the main tools that are used for getting into the real data analysis. That would be like if Apple bought Crystal Reports. Ouch.

It's interesting that the arena that these guys play in is so small, yet worth so much money.

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[mandie]

Ballmer and Jobs seem to be less egotistical than Ellison, as well. And that's saying something, because no one ever accused either of a lack of self-worth.

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[triffid_98]

Nothing new for Ellison, before the Peoplesoft deal he bought out Webgain(Toplink ORM) and now the licenses are up to $5k/cpu unless you're running the Oracle AS in which case it's free..

Damn, Ballmer and Jobs have got *nothing* on Ellison when it comes to sheer brutality. He's cutting out SAP's legs from under them by buying up and shutting down (or converting or Oracle optimized... same thing) the main tools that are used for getting into the real data analysis.

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[natd]

I just had to post..I'm having real trouble seeing how "That would be like if Apple bought Crystal Reports. Ouch. " fits in.

Honestly...please, I want to know!

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[zootm]

Crystal Reports is a tool commonly used to enhance the reporting capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio. The case here is Oracle buying up the manufacturer of tools which are used to enhance their competitor's product, and I suppose Apple buying Crystal Reports would be a similar case if you consider Apple's dev tools as competitors to Microsoft's. I'm not sure I do, though.

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[wiresquire]

That would be like if Apple bought Crystal Reports.

Sorry, I can't work out if that is sarcasm, or if you own stock in Crystal Reports?

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[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.

I remember Hyperion

[AndroidCat]

It seems like a lot of cash for an old amber screen mostly PC compatible [wikipedia.org].

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[_Bucktooth_]

It's way too much even for this yacht. [royalhuisman.com]

Incidentally, this yacht was built for Jim Clark, [wikipedia.org] the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, and featured the first carbon fiber mast and computerised sail system. I'm not a sailing geek, but I want to be!

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[AndroidCat]

Some of that The Soul of a New Machine thang, eh? (Actually the sailing part is only a short bit at the start of the book to set the mood. A good book about a ho-hum product.)

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.

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[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, pr

Tales from beyond the taxi ride.

[Hucko]

I'm a taxi driver in lil Rockhampton,Qld,Aus. I had a salesman from Oracle in my cab today telling about this! He was selling software to our local uni. Funnily enough, he seemed sad that there are company with more dosh to through around than some countries GDP.

What for?

[Nuffsaid]

What is the evil plan behind the acquisition of a huge icy moon [nineplanets.org] weighting almost 18 millions billions tons? Easy. Move it in Earth orbit and threat your competitors to crush their headquarters with the power of millions of H bombs if they don't hand you ONE HUNDRED THOUSANDS BILIONS DOLLARS!!! MhuuahahahAHAH!!!

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[TacNuke]

For a second I thought they bought the planet Hyperion. Look out for the Shrike is all I have to say.

Consolidation may not work well

[cyberianpan]

I use & develop for Hyperion extensively, the front end Analyzer is a very powerful GUI, even I as a SQL developer gladly use it as it saves "handcoding" SQL... in fact with response times of 5 seconds from conception of grouping to execution & data return it is a no brainer for me, let alone end users.

However the Hyperion suite is very much end of the food chain, after the fact. It relies on other operational/transactional systems to produce the data. Thus its independence was an advantage. Its ETL is somewhat weak & support patchy so possibly Oracle can help there. However Oracle are a direct competitor to the other operational/transactional systems (e.. Teradata,IBM, SAP etc) ... thus the possible market for Hyperion is limited by this takeover. I'm not sure on the value add... people who would have bought Hyperion alongside some Oracle system still will. Any other combo is going to be a harder sell...

Oh, good!

[entmike]

Oddly enough, I sit here and read this while in SAP's Business Warehouse training. Then again, I'm a SAP Basis Admin, and kind of HOPE we one day drop our BW implementation. ;)

SAP bought Pilot Software

[bjelkeman]

SAP on the other hand bought Pilot Software [sap.com], a California based company (with engineering in Cambridge, Mass.) for an undisclosed sum the other day. Pilot Software has many of the engineers from the original Pilot Software, which went through a number of transitions before ending up with SAP. They have some of the very first OLAP tools which still work really well, but have been concentrating on Performance Management tools over the last three or four years. Pilots PM tool, PilotWorks, is actually rather ni

SQR gets bought again

[Master of Transhuman]

I don't HOW many corporate changes that product has been through. For the ignorant, SQR is a report/programming language used by PeopleSoft and others to write programs and generate reports from databases. I got some experience using it at City College of San Francisco with Oracle databases and the SCT Banner college information system.

It's a niche product and basically an obsolete language, having not really been significantly enhanced in some time on Hyperion's watch.

It's been around for years and been th