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."

Comments

in cash?

[piojo]

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

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.

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.

What for?

[Nuffsaid]

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!!!