Cognos shrugs off Oracle's Hyperion buy

Stephen Withers
Friday, 02 March 2007 07:56

IT Industry - Market

Cognos is talking up its prospects following Oracle's announcement that it will acquire Hyperion, one of Cognos' rivals in the business intelligence and analytics market.

Oracle has agreed to pay approximately $US3.3 billion for Hyperion.

"The acquisition of Hyperion makes Oracle the category leader in the high growth enterprise performance management market," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Hyperion's EPM software coupled with Oracle's Business Intelligence (BI) tools and analytic applications form an end-to-end performance management system that includes planning, budgeting, consolidation, operational analytics and compliance reporting."

But Cognos officials said "Cognos is the leader in enterprise business intelligence, and now that a competitor has been removed from the market there is a significant new opportunity in front of us."

"Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle's offerings to SAP customers," said Oracle president Charles Phillips. "Thousands of SAP customers rely on Hyperion as their financial consolidation, analysis and reporting system of record. Oracle already has PeopleSoft HR, Siebel CRM, G-Log, Demantra, i-flex, Oracle Retail, and Oracle Fusion Middleware installed at SAP's largest ERP customers. Now Oracle's Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data."

Cognos officials countered with "Cognos offers a single performance management vision and an integrated solution, in stark contrast to Oracle’s substantial product overlap and conflicting product vision."

"Cognos customers will continue to receive innovation on a rapid and regular basis – which is based on customer and market needs -- that only an independent leader can provide," they added.

SAP wasn't impressed by Phillips' statement either.

"The Hyperion deal is one more way that Oracle attempts to hide the fact that applications is not its core business, whereas applications has been, and will continue to be, SAP's core business," officials said. "Oracle wants to distract the market from the real story — which is that Oracle has made no progress on applications software in 36 months, and we hear that Fusion is further delayed."

All three companies' shares opened down after the announcement. All three subsequently recovered, but only SAP is above the level it was trading at early this week.