Hyperion Solutions Corp yesterday announced the acquisition of Sapling Corp for $15.5m in cash. Under the deal, Hyperion will get its hands on Sapling’s analytical applications for enterprise performance management, which it is says will enable it to offer a better, more integrated solution than comparable products from Oracle Corp and SAP AG. Today’s announcement follows the signing of a global reseller agreement just two weeks ago, under which Hyperion was given the rights to sell Sapling’s core products, NetProphet and NetScore, as part of its suite of analytical applications. But the market for enterprise performance management applications is growing at such a rate – IDC says the market will be worth 1.6bn by 2002 – that Hyperion decided to ditch the OEM agreement and buy the company outright instead.
Our core strategy is to develop analytical applications to help companies improve their performance, said Rich Clayton, Hyperion’s senior director of product marketing, Sapling is excellent in performance management and we wanted to eliminate competition from SAP and Oracle so it made sense to buy the company. NetProphet, to be renamed Hyperion Activity Based Management, enables companies to optimize the deployment of their enterprise resources. It lets administrators and managers use business process modeling to get a better understanding of resource utilization, costs and operational constraints. NetScore, now called Hyperion Performance Measurement, is a customizable packaged analytic application used to communicate organizational strategy and accountability while tracking progress toward business objectives.
Clayton said that Sapling had already integrated its software with Hyperion’s Essbase OLAP server, alongwith its suite of analytic applications. Now the two companies will work to develop joint products, although he said it was too early to give a timeframe for their delivery. Having the software integrated, and accessible via the internet, is key to Hyperion’s strategy to ward off competition from SAP and Oracle, Clayton said. Both software giants offer similar solutions, Oracle with its Express product and SAP with its management cockpit software, but both offerings only give access to the software to a handful of isolated executives, instead of sharing the information around the company, Clayton said. We don’t want this area to be the next EIS (executive information system) market where the applications are limited to the top executives in a closed war room, he said, It needs to be accessible by all. Moreover, Oracle’s and SAP’s systems are only linked to their ERP systems, whereas integrating Sapling’s software with Hyperion’s Essbase OLAP server enables companies to use the performance management software against ERP and customer relationship management applications; financial data and HR systems.
