Hyperion is added to Oracle line-up

Oracle is taking the fight to rival SAP with its capture of business intelligence (BI) firm Hyperion for US$3.3billion, the enterprise software vendor said last week.

While the firm said the deal would bolster its presence in the high-growth performance management market, executives were equally quick to point out that it also gives it more traction with SAP customers.

“Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle’s offerings to SAP customers,” said Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president, in the statement announcing the deal. He said that thousands of SAP customers already use Hyperion’s software, along with other packages from Oracle.

“Now Oracle’s Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP’s most important customers view and analyse their underlying SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) data,” he concluded.

In a statement, SAP countered that the Hyperion buy “further muddies Oracle’s already cluttered application landscape”, following on from its earlier acquisitions. Oracle has been on a spending spree for several years, with a string of deals including its US$5.85 billion capture of Siebel Systems last year and PeopleSoft for US$10.3 billion in 2005.

Hyperion sells BI tools and financial applications to corporates, with Oracle claiming that it counts most of the Fortune 500 as customers.