Hyperion is Back at Oracle

New Flair: Hyperion site update. The brand new red and white Oracle signage was applied yesterday on the former Hyperion (and Palm before that) buildings yesterday. It turns out news of Hyperion's removal was premature, and the new PLM addition to the family, Agile, is about to join with some of the Hyperion team in their former office space at Santa Clara. Either way, people are moving around and things are happening. While it is still not clear which version of BI the field sales teams are selling at Oracle, they are clearly selling the Hyperion financial applications and all the ERP reps have the opportunity to sell PLM. This may or may not be Office Space recut as a horror movie, but certainly a lot of new people making the "Oh" face.

Hyperion Bites the Dust

Finally, the end of an era. The Hyperion logo has now been officially removed from the building and street signage at the former Hyperion mothership on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara. The building and parking lot has looked empty for a while, and maybe that is the reason it took so long to finally remove the signage.

The logo was part of the marketing makeover spearheaded by the arrival of Heidi Melin as CMO. As the logo was fairly new, it likely does not invoke the same nostalgia of the PeopleSoft logo, or PeopleSoft the company. There are many people who still speak very fondly of their time at PeopleSoft and it is not uncommon to see one of the old PeopleSoft dark backpacks with the red and blue logo which were standard issue for the entire organization on the street or in an airport. Team PeopleSoft positioned themselves as the people people in technology. Maybe that is why it still doesn't look right when you drive east on 580 and see the old PeopleSoft campus and sign with the big bold colors of Oracle. It would be interesting to hear Melin's take on this since she was group VP and brand czar at PSFT before coming to Hyperion. What looks great in the bank may feel a little less great. At least one version of Hyperion's logo still lives on in the Oracle website. As for the Hyperion BI product, it remains to be seen.

The CIO Blog has Questions on Hyperion and Oracle as Well...

I'm sure many vendors out there would love to know the answers...

Hold on a Minute...

Interestingly, the market doesn't seem to agree with Mr. Morrissey's analysis of the situation. Although Business Objects certainly has quite a good stable of consolidations customers in the marketplace, it's been no secret that the global GAAP heavy duty reporting and consolidations functionality has been lacking in its product arsenal, and Cartesis, with it's almost exclusive stable of enterprise customers, clearly fills this aspect of the product portfolio.

If you look at the move by Oracle, they made no bones about the fact that the rationale for the acquisition was clearly to move into the CFO office and stake a claim to turf previously held by SAP. I'd strongly argue that the move by Business Objects provides it with a clear path to the same audience that was previously lacking before on a consistent basis. Planning overlap aside (which although not insigificant, was clearly not the rationale behind the deal and the Cartesis planning product is by no means a market leader), you can make a strong case that the end to end functionality of the BusinessObject EPM stack is now much stronger and more complete as a result of this acquisition. I just don't know if you can make the same case for SAP, which was my point. It's a lot to pay for something that isn't readily apparent to the marketplace.

By their own admission, they were caught flat footed by the Oracle announcement, and by all accounts things are more than a little unsettled in Palo Alto in terms of the GTM strategy. Now will it turn out to be a good thing for SAP? Who knows. It could be. But it's a lot to pay to bring in functionality that you already have in full.

Anyone for tea? I'm thirsty and there appears to be a kettle brewing on our blog...

SAP Buys Outlooksoft

Consolidation in financial analytics and performance management is happening at light speed with the announcement yesterday that SAP plans to acquire Outlooksoft. In their announcement, SAP clearly positions this as extending its solutions for the CFO's office and expanding its portfolio to include performance management. In SAP speak, they provide everything from governance, risk and compliance to performance management, while doing a little ERP as well.

Interestingly, SAP usually does not usually spend much time talking about performance management as a stand alone offering, yet with Hyperion buying Oracle and Business Objects buying Cartesis, SAP could not afford to be left on the sidelines. Paul Hammerman at Forrester indicates that this closes a gap around Planning in the SAP product line in his interview with SearchSAP and notes that SAP's Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) was not great. Hammerman suggests that SAP is losing CPM deals to best of breed vendors like Hyperion and Cognos.

OutlookSoft had been all Microsoft, all the time, until recently when they expanded support for Oracle. Outlooksoft offers a nice Excel front-end tool and makes it easy to do custom planning, budgeting and forecasting. The capability is user friendly for finance teams who have grown up with Excel. The capabilities and ease of use are both things SAP customers will benefit from, but there is clearly some overlap with existing functionality, and OutlookSoft products are not going to be used like Hyperion or Cartesis for complex consolidations. John Haggerty from AMR research points this out specifically in his view of the SAP acquisition.

"When thinking of Outlooksoft, we picture an image of a solid, highly usable, prediction-focused planning, budgeting and forecasting system. Customers, many of which are divisions of larger organizations, have built very responsive and flexible planning systems with the product. The consolidation tool is decent, but used more for budgeting and forecasting roll ups and less for complex enterprise consolidations, which is what SAP customers will need and expect. "

I would suggest this is true for legacy SAP customers, but maybe less so for the next generation of SAP customers, who are smaller organizations. SAP has spent a lot of energy and money talking and marketing to the mid-market with NetWeaver, even spending on ads suggesting start ups use SAP. While there is little evidence to suggest this is true, SAP has been touting mid-market wins and spent many cycles at Saffire 2007 talking about the mid-market and their strategy.

SAP's Chairman Hasso Plattner unveiled SAP's focus on SaaS as part of their mid-market strategy at Software 2007 yesterday. His chalkboard slide set was interesting to those of us in the audience, but the strategy was not as warmly received by the media. (Thanks Darren). Regardless of whether you believe SAP will be successful with on-demand, the Outlooksoft acquisition will sell very well in the mid-market, be very applicable for existing SAP enterprise customers, especially at division and business line levels, and the concept of extending Outlooksoft into a SaaS option is not a big jump. The OutlookSoft offering with Oracle also gives them something else to sell into Oracle and Hyperion customers, many of them still running on OFA and Essbase that is way past its prime.

Very clearly the consolidation wave has crested. Will the last pure play financial analytics and performance management vendor please hit the lights on the way out.

Reading the Tea Leaves in EPM

Well one of the performance guys has been in the UK this week, and came across this interesting article on-line at the Financial Director website about the game of musical chairs currently being played amongst all the vendors in the performance management space in the wake of the Oracle/Hyperion news.

Looks like lots of implications and potential combinations all around, and it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out--read on!