Oracle closed its $3.3bn acquisition of Santa Clara, California-based Hyperion in June this year to advance its business intelligence and business performance management strategy.
Oracle this week said it had reached the first key integration milestone for BI which is part of a roadmap for its Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system going forwards.
Oracle EPM helps companies to monitor performance of business plans by linking them closely to key operational metrics. The product spans across traditional BI, financial management and operational BI applications. What Oracle has delivered this week is integration between Hyperion’s BI Essbase OLAP server and other BI tools and its own BI Suite Enterprise Edition suite, to provide a BI foundation for EPM.
Both set of products have recently been enhanced: Essbase now comes with better time-series support, a new trickle-feed capability for handling real-time analytics; Oracle BI Suite EE has also been given new collaboration, search and information delivery tools, including Oracle’s BI Publisher and Office integration.
The integrated BI platform is part of Oracle’s EPM system which now includes a unified semantic data layer and common metadata, user Workspace and infrastructure services.
Hyperion has also now certified Hyperion’s BI and other financial performance management applications to work with EPM-supported web browsers, operating systems and hardware platforms.
The idea is to make all BI components hot-pluggable so they can easily be dropped and deployed into existing Oracle IT environments. That notion positions Oracle’s BI and EPM as application services of Oracle’s Fusion SOA-based middleware product family.
Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle has also aligned licensing of Hyperion’s products with its own, including the addition of standard Oracle Lifetime support policies. It has also certified all applications to run on the Oracle 11g database and 10g Release 3 application server. Hyperion’s old user-interfaces and documentation have also been Oracle re-branded.
Additionally, Oracle is also allowing Hyperion sites to use its Internet Directory, Virtual Director and Identify Manager for better end-user management.
Supporting all of the above product initiatives is a new EPM global business unit that Oracle has set up to provide unified development, sales, channel, support and consulting across the Oracle-Hyperion BI and performance management suite of tools and applications.
Our View
The hot-pluggable nature of Oracle’s BI and EPM strategy certainly reads well on a two-page press release. But it also allows Oracle to be sufficiently vague about real back-end integration, where differing data models, OLAP structures and metadata need to be reconciled. Dealing the hot-pluggable card to Hyperion users is a clever ploy by Oracle as it serves two purposes: it shows the market that it is making steady progress in integrating its various BI and performance management assets; yet at the same time it reassures Hyperion customers that they won’t be forced onto an Oracle platform (instead they have the option to plug-into that environment while still protecting their investments.).
But Oracle still faces a stiff challenge to integrate its broad Hyperion suite. Hyperion itself worked hard for several years to integrate its BI and financial management tools under a single umbrella – System 9. Now Oracle has to take that integration and layer it across its own BI and EPM suite of products. The announcement made to today is a good start, but it needs to go a lot deeper than just the interface to justify a unified BI and performance management label.
