Hyperion Solutions Corp gets a Nasdaq listing today following shareholder approval of Hyperion Software’s acquisition of Arbor Software Corp. It’s going head-to-head with Oracle Corp in the OLAP/business intelligence market and will use its $200m cash pile and well as organic growth to expand the product roadmap and integrate existing technologies. The deal will see Hyperion partners and resellers marketing its packaged applications for the first time. Until now only Baan Co NV has been able to resell the Hyperion applications. Furthermore the company’s salespeople will be able to sell partner applications or Hyperion products. By the fourth quarter the company will have developed links to enable users of the Hyperion Pillar and Enterprise budgeting and financial applications to move data into Arbor’s Essbase OLAP engine for analysis and integrate Hyperion’s reporting and SpiderMan web applications tools in conjunction with Essbase. The company says it will also enable Hyperion to access third party tools supported by Essbase. Further out – and it won’t say when – the company will integrate Essbase into packaged analytic applications. Hyperion OLAP customers will be encouraged to migrate to Essbase although the company says it will continue to support existing customers. The discrete point products will still be available. New packaged applications are being developed for additional marketing, including manufacturing, and Hyperion says that in future its packaged applications will incorporate reporting, analysis, modeling and planning. The company says it will combine Hyperion and Arbor software for dealing with spreadsheets and using the web; plans for which it will announce in Europe at its October user conference. Although it claims it won’t compete with its partners, which include ERP, financial software and tools companies – plus IBM Corp – the new Hyperion will have to do some pretty nifty footwork in some sectors to keep this promise, we think. The combined operation, worth some $375m revenue and with 1,800 employees clearly doesn’t see long- time analytic application company SAS Institute as an immediate rival and expects Microsoft Corp’s entry into the desktop OLAP space with Plato to help the development of the business intelligence market in general. The company is talking up market research suggesting the OLAP server and packaged analytic application market will be worth a staggering $6.3bn by 2001 up from $3.1bn this year. Investors poured cold water on the deal when it was announced in May, largely over expectations – Arbor growing by some 70% and Hyperion by 32% – and stocks of both companies were still trading well below their year-highs yesterday. Much of the new management structure is inherited from Arbor. Chairman and CEO John Dillon is president and CEO of the combined unit, while Hyperion CEO James Perakis is chairman. Hyperion SVP development Mark Bilger continues in the same role, while Arbor SVP worldwide sales Bill Binch becomes SVP sales and Arbor SVP marketing Kirk Cruikshank gets SVP marketing in the combined unit. CFO Stephen Imbler was Arbor’s CFO.
Content from our partners
