It should not be shocking that Oracle has acquired Hyperion, the leading provider of Business Performance Management (BPM) tools. Oracle has been acquiring technology “up the stack” for many years. What does this mean for choice in a very critical area of investment? Forward looking companies have been acquiring BPM solutions for budgeting/forecasting, consolidation/financial reporting, and dashboarding/scorecarding in order to give their front line managers an increasing forward-looking view of their organizational performance. This is not going to change as the future is far too important to these organizations. What is going to change is their choice is going to be a limited one.
The consolidation wave in BPM has been ongoing. Only recently the former Comshare MPC product line was acquired by Infor, the 3rd largest provider of enterprise software systems. Now Oracle’s acquisition leaves a much smaller field of “non-aligned” options. OutlookSoft, Cartesis, Business Objects, and Cognos lead the list. Choices can be deceiving though, with Cognos having the larger market presence, but already finding themselves forced into acquiring much of their critical BPM technology and thus living with lack of integration in their approach. At the same time, Business Objects has no functionality in many critical areas of BPM.
For Oracle-committed clients, Larry Ellison has pretty much made their choice for BPM. Oracle has acquired the “hands down” leader in the space. Hyperion technology will replace aging and flawed products such as OFA, FSG, and Enterprise Planning & Budgeting, as well as the newly released Financial Consolidation Hub. Oracle clients will see significant benefits as Oracle increasingly integrates a solution that already worked well with Oracle (the companies have many shared clients).
SAP clients face a tough choice as their vendor has “struck out” for many years with attempts to build support for BPM into their tool. Of course, some might continue to wait on SAP, but more will need to “cross party lines” in order to acquire the critical functionality their business requires in order to compete.
What will be most interesting is how much leverage Oracle receives from this acquisition. They have acquired the leading technology to assist multi-enterprise software clients (e.g. larger firms that have, say, both SAP and Oracle in-house) with BPM. How much additional ERP and database revenue will Oracle be able to acquire with clients increasingly interested in investing in single vendor solutions?