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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."
That's a lot of cash. I wonder how they'll carry it?
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
My journal
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.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
What is the evil plan behind the acquisition of a huge icy moon 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!!!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
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.
... 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...
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)