update Software giant Oracle's acquisition of business intelligence vendor Hyperion is no great shakes, according to three of Hyperion's largest competitors.
Oracle announced last week that it would buy Hyperion for US$3.3 billion. Soon after the announcement was released, several of Hyperion's rivals responded to the purchase with public statements.
"Business Objects is the number one leader in Business Intelligence (BI)," said Keith Budge, senior vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific and Japan.
"The distant number seven [Oracle] acquiring number four in the market [Hyperion] does not change that," he said in a statement on Friday.
Budge claimed that to Oracle, BI was "an accessory to a database or applications", whereas customers wanted BI that gave them insight into all of their databases and applications from any vendor.
The executive added that Business Objects had the only open (compatible with multiple respect to databases, middleware and applications), broad (covering a variety of BI needs from data quality to performance management) and integrated (around a single platform -- BusinessObjects XI) BI solution.
Fellow BI vendor Cognos saw Oracle's acquisition as an opportunity to bolster its own fortunes.
Like Business Objects, Cognos claimed in a statement released last week it was the leader in enterprise business intelligence software, and that its own products could interface with those of a variety of other vendors.
The vendor said it had a "singular focus" on performance management solutions, offering an integrated solution, "in stark contrast to Oracle's substantial product overlap and conflicting product vision".
Oracle arch-rival SAP also claimed the Hyperion buy was a positive."With the demise of Hyperion, we expect to continue our ascendancy to the leadership position in this market," SAP said. In 2006, analyst group IDC declared the German vendor the leader in analytic applications.
SAP said Oracle's strategy "appears to be one of acquiring customers through acquisitions, perhaps due to an inability to grow on its own" as opposed to its strategy of growing organically.
BI vendor SAS Institute and Oracle could not comment at press time.
Working for an Australian based business solutions company, a senior manager hearing about the Hyperion sale commented that the CEO of a very large ERP company once said (very passionately)
"You know when a software company has problems when it starts writing checks rather than software."
- The CEO was Larry Ellison.
Is this the case here? Oracle has gobbled up a lot of companies over the last decade. Is it a move to scuttle SAP users, or is it a purchase which adds (a large amount, given the amount paid) to Oracle's offering to customers?