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Oracle to Buy Hyperion for $3.3 Billion

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the big-ticket-items dept.

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."

5 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Buzzword alert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software... "Business intelligence" software is a fancy term for MS Excel spreadsheets.
    1. Re:Buzzword alert by lamasquerade · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --

      // It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis

  2. Turnabout by PingXao · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  3. Nasty! by DogDude · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
  4. Consolidation may not work well by cyberianpan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...