Sending a message

Hyperion’s Solutions conference wound down with over 4,000 customers and partners being told that the $3.3 billion Oracle takeover, now finalized, is good news for all.Hyperion’s CTO John Kopcke, who is remaining with the company, stressed that Oracle’s technology stack, and specifically Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), is a good fit with its products.

“OBIEE offers heterogeneous access to data in a thin client environment. Hyperion and Oracle’s visions are the same,” he said.

Hyperion has always been designed to work in heterogeneous environments, and its developers will remain in place.

Kopcke also expressed confidence in Oracle’s ability to manage the takeover without alienating customers or partners. “Look at PeopleSoft after the Oracle acquisition,” he says, “Their renewal rates are the highest they’ve ever been. This is a good sign for us.”

Paul Rodwick, Oracle’s VP of pro-duct management for business intelligence, was also eager to pacify customers. “It’s important to realize that similar products will be maintained,” he said. “We will not force customers to move.”

“A hundred people representing 40 Canadian clients came to Hyperion Solutions, and they see the benefit,” added Terry Furlong, sales director for Canada.

The message is pure Oracle, following its strategy from the Siebel and PeopleSoft acquisitions, where customers are being placed into a “protect, extend, evolve strategy” with all legacy software supported.

The Hyperion brand for master data management for customer and product information – two areas where Oracle’s solutions are more robust – likely won’t be extended. Where Hyperion really shines, in management reporting and complex hierarchies for key performance indicators, will be of continued focus.

Howard Dresner, Hyperion’s chief strategy officer, emphasized that what his company offers is really a business solution, and that this fits with Oracle’s vision. The implication is that Cognos and Business Objects will now have a tougher time competing against Oracle and SAP.

Issues surrounding open-source, on-demand and SOA still remain – Oracle is not shying away from any of these areas – but in this space it is clear that Oracle is still pushing a proprietary stack in a client-server environment.

“For transactional ERP, performance management and business intelligence, the customer wants to own the solution and keep it close,” said Rodwick, “and the combined Oracle offering provides the lowest total costs.”

From a Canadian perspective, clients won’t notice much of a difference, although after July the Canadian Hyperion sales force will likely integrate and re-brand as Oracle. The push will then be to get higher adoption rates for financial analytics in Canada. “We’re about 18 months behind the U.S.,” said Furlong. “This is standard, but now we’re seeing more diverse activity as the Canadian economy grows.”

As for SAP, Kopcke claims that in the past it had tried to out-muscle Hyperion but that that will be a lot harder now.

“I got a call from one of the big five,” says Furlong, referring to a company with a large SAP practice in Canada, “and they see this (acquisition by Oracle) as a very positive thing”.

Kopcke stressed that until the deal was approved, U.S. merger laws restricted the two companies from sharing things such as access to customer lists, so a lot of merge detail had yet to be worked out.

As a result, there is still limited visibility in some areas. Within a total Oracle solution, what will function as a general purpose MDM layer, and what as a specialized BI layer? Will there be a continued push to SOA beyond System 9?

It seems likely. Says Kopcke, “With this acquisition Oracle has the opportunity to solve the whole problem.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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