Throw another one into Oracle’s Fusion melting pot of acquisition assimulation. On March 1st, Oracle has announced plans to acquire $3.3 billion Hyperion Solutions. With 12,000 customers and 2500 employees in 20 countries, the acquisition isn’t a small one. And this is just one of more than 28 acqusitions that Oracle has made since 2005.
By purchasing Hyperion Solutions, Oracle has further jacked up up the pressure that they’ve been applying to SAP. Many Hyperion customers are also SAP customers, and this purchase brings Oracle closer to them. This move alone is probably not enough to bring any existing SAP customers into the Oracle camp, but it’s an effective piece of an overall strategy.
Hyperion Solutions is primarily a Business Integration (BI) vendor. Gartner has Hyperion positioned in the Leader Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. But Gartner has also ranked them in the Leader Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management. With this acquisition, Oracle repositions itself within those two domains. Hyperion competitors include Cognos, Microstrategy, Business Objects and many others.
Oracle sees the purchase of Hyperion as a way to diversify its base. Hyperion was a selection that recognized it as a best-of-breed solution rather than a solution with ties exclusively to Oracle. Oracle’s world-view has widened considerably of late, and it is finding itself working more and more alongside of solutions that involve non-Oracle databases and applications.
Marketing and positioning of Hyperion relative to Oracle’s existing products will present a challenge because of a large number of overlapping products. For example, Oracle’s OLAP product Express versus Hyperion Essbase. Hyperion offers Sales and Marketing Analytics and Oracle’s Siebel has similar capabilities. There is also overlap of data integration and reporting tools — Hyperion’s Brio versus Oracle’s newly acquired Sunopsis.
It looks like the consolidation sprees of 2006 will spill over into 2007. This acquisition will likely put Cognos and possibly Business Objects into play with purchases by IBM or SAP. And one might then wonder who could Oracle buy next?
