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
Posted March 1, 2007 11:50 AM
Permalink | 3 Comments |
Craig-
I think you make a great point about customers that want a performance application but don't necessarily want the underlying platform. FYI, the Pilot application will soon be available integrated with SAP Netweaver but will continue to be available stand-alone. We believe that customers deserve real choices.
Craig,
Stop pontificating and put some substance behind your comments. First it is unlikely the Hyperion direction will change a lot, except some developers will work on integrating the Oracle/Hyperion platforms. Other than that, Hyperion will still be an agnostic BPM application. Second, the acquisition was easy for Oracle as the cash on Hyperion's balance sheet plus the next five years of maintenance will pay for it. The real plus is for Oracle customers who have not specified a BPM direction and now have the quality products from Hyperion available. Non-Oracle customer will still have the same choices available to them for the past two years.
"Mandy", I agree with you about the benefit to Oracle customers, eventually. I was a member of the Hyperion senior management team during the Arbor/Hyperion merger. Using that as a guide I have to disagree with your comments regarding direction and disruption. Post-merger some products were killed, support of TM1 as an OLAP engine was dropped in favor of essbase (from Arbor), Hyperion lost a third of its workforce, and basically lost direction and market value for about 3 years. I'm not saying this will turn out exactly the same, just don't underestimate the potential impact.