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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."

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Buzzword alert by SashaMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.