It's official. Oracle has bought Hyperion for $3.3 billion. The main assets include Hyperion's enterprise planning system, OLAP engine and financial consolidataion product, the latter of which is widely considered best of its kind. Perhaps most important in this for enterprise data warehouse environments, where Oracle and Business Objects mostly are, is that it would appear now that Oracle is not buying Business Objects.

The Hyperion OLAP product could replace the Oracle OLAP component now in the Oracle DW stack. Oracle OLAP has been only modestly embraced by Oracle DW customers. On the other hand, the Hyperion tool has become more of a "data mart" in its environments. I wonder if Oracle will get behind an EDW strategy with Hyperion or continue the "mart excellence" approach that Hyperion has got the most traction with.

I can still see IBM buying Cognos (or Microstrategy). I also know excellent, experienced information management talent is being amassed at Hewlett Packard and would not be surprised to see an acquisition there as part of an impending market push to join IBM, SAP and Oracle in the BI race.

This acquisition, along with any others that happen between now and then (and that will happen in the future) will doubtlessly be points of conversation at the Pacific Northwest BI Summit.

Technorati tags: Business Objects, SAP, Hewlett Packard, Hyperion, Oracle,
data warehouse