Oracle to acquire Hyperion for $3.3 billion

Oracle (ORCL) has announced thursday that it has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions (HYSL) for $3.3 billion ($52 a share). Hyperion is a leading maker of Business Intelligence(BI) and Performance Management(PM) solutions.

The acqusition closure ends all speculations regarding which BI company Oracle is intended to buy. Those rumors resulted in Business Objects shares climbing 4%.

The Hyperion deal is the third major acquisition Oracle completes in the last year (Acquired Peoplesoft for $10.3 billion and Siebel for $5.85 billion).

I see two main reasons for this acquisition:

1. Oracle would like to leverage Hyperions’ leadership, expertise and customer base to become the business intelligence market leader. Oracle already announced that the Hyperion products will be integrated into the Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) suite.
2. Oracle would like to leverage existing Hyperion installations at traditional SAP customers in order to extend its footprint within those accounts. Oracle sees great importance in the fact that SAP ERP data will be analyzed with her products.

The real question however, is what customers will do. The question whether Oracle Database customers will migrate their existing BI platforms to Hyperion/Oracle is still unanswered. Independent BI vendors Business Objects and Cognos spokesmen indicated that it’s likely that customers will stick to their current implemented BI suite and won’t be tempted to migrate to the integrated Oracle suite.

[tags]Oracle Hyperion, Business Intelligence, Oracle, Hyperion[/tags]