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Giants on The Move

Occasionally living in the UK has its disadvantages when it comes to state side technology announcements that happen during our evening time. Already some of my fellow US based experts on the B-Eye-Network have blogged the Oracle announcement on their purchase of Hyperion. This is living up to my blog at the beginning of the year on BI and Performance Management Trends for 2007 where I predicted that at least one of the major independent BI vendors would be acquired. Well, it’s only the beginning of March and we have 10 months still left in the year.

SAP have moved for a smaller BI vendor (Pilot) to beef up their analytic applications. Oracle have now gone further with its Hyperion acquisition. Oracle’s challenge is now to define a really clear roadmap on BI for their customer base and helping them shift from the older Discoverer and Reports products to the Enterprise Edition Siebel Analytics based tools and now Hyperion. Integration of BI tools will be key but Oracle have just got a lot more mindshare in Finance departments of major corporations around the world where Hyperion has a stronghold. With CFOs becoming increasingly powerful executives (at least in Europe) it could be a shrewd move by Oracle if they can deepen the integration of Hyperion with Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. While this is a battle for enterprise BI and Performance Management it seems to me that getting the support of the CFO is critical.

In my opinion IBM has to move soon if they are going to compete here and so I don’t think we’re done yet. As for Microsoft…..who knows.

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