Oracle Hyperion merger has pure play BI vendors worried

Stan Beer
Sunday, 04 March 2007 17:38

Opinion and Analysis

When an event happens that shakes up a market such as business intelligence you just know that pure play vendors are severely disturbed when they feel a need to issue media statements to pre-empt press enquiries. The Oracle acquisition of a leading pure play BI vendor Hyperion seems to have ruffled feathers and caused beads of sweat to form on at least two of the major BI specialists.

Leading pure play BI vendors Business Objects and Cognos both issued unsolicited carefully worded statements to the media. Of the two, market leader appeared to be the more defensive and appeared to convey that its territory was under threat.

Keith Budge, senior vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, Business Objects, said in a statement:

“Business Objects is the number one leader in Business Intelligence (BI), the distant number seven (Oracle) acquiring number four in the market (Hyperion) does not change that.

“To Oracle, BI is an accessory to a database or to applications. Customers demand mission critical BI that gives them insight into all of their databases and a wide variety of applications from any vendor, because the world they work in is naturally heterogeneous.

“Business Objects provides the only enterprise-class solution that is at the same time OPEN (with respect to databases, middleware, applications), BROAD (covering BI needs from Data Quality to Performance Management) and INTEGRATED (around one single platform - BusinessObjects XI).”

In contrast, Cognos was more circumspect and attempted to present the acquisition in a positive light:

"Oracle’s intention to acquire Hyperion is a game-changing event for our market and opens up a tremendous opportunity for Cognos," the statement read.

"Specifically, this acquisition strengthens Cognos’ competitive position in the following areas:

1.  Clear independent leader: Customers have heterogeneous database and application environments and require their Performance Management (PM) from a database- and ERP-independent vendor. Cognos is clearly now their number one choice, and we remain laser focused on bringing that value of our independence to our customers.

2.    Leader in Enterprise BI: 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.

3.    Singular PM Focus: Cognos’ singular focus on Performance Management enables us to innovate and respond to the changing needs of PM customers better and faster than any other vendor.

4.    Single Performance Management Vision and Solution: Cognos offers a single performance management vision and an integrated solution, in stark contrast to Oracle’s substantial product overlap and conflicting product vision.

"Our customers are benefiting from many of our “first to market” innovations in our applications, mobile solutions and Services Oriented Architecture – all key enablers of the most encompassing Performance Management and Business Intelligence solutions in the market. As an independent Performance Management provider, 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."

Last week, Gartner released a research note from a survey predicting that the major software vendors would move in on the pure play BI vendors in the coming year. The US$3.3 billion acquisition of Hyperion appears to suggest that Gartner may well be on the money in this case and the big question may well be: who's next?