Blog: Craig Schiff

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March 1, 2007

Consolidation Continues: Oracle Buys Hyperion

Exciting news certainly, but who will truly benefit? The shareholders of Hyperion who are receiving a nice premium on their stock should be happy. What about the customers of Hyperion and prospective BPM purchasers? I don't think so. There is always risk to customers of smaller vendors being acquired in terms of product direction, existing sales and services relationships, and just general disruption and distraction. I am not sure that the combination offers anything new to potential purchasers that they couldn't already get elsewhere. What about the other BPM vendors? I do think this presents an opportunity for them as independent, focused BPM solution providers being able to sell to users of any ERP system, especially those who have not standardized on Oracle enterprise-wide. I think the concept of this combination is intriguing, but the realities are less so. While Oracle states this will enable them to 'provide the first integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System that spans planning, consolidation, operational analytic applications, BI tools, reporting, and data integration, all on a unified BI platform', I have to disagree.

What about the offerings of SAS, Business Objects, and Cognos? They could all make the end-to-end performance management claim. Also, I believe the use of the term 'integrated' is a bit premature. Unless they have been secretly working on integrating their offerings for many months there is a lot of work ahead. In addition there is significant product overlap. What about Oracle's Enterprise Planning and Budgeting, or PeopleSoft's EPM suite? As a matter of fact this is beginning to look a lot like Infor, with similar benefits and challenges. The biggest hurdle to overcome is getting someone who has not already standardized on your transactional systems to purchase your performance applications. PeopleSoft couldn't do it. SAP couldn't do it. Oracle itself was unable to do it. Of course they will inherit many Hyperion customers who currently have different ERP systems, but what about new customers going forward?

Technorati Tags: Hyperion, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Cognos, Business Objects

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