Oracle won't abandon Hyperion products

Oracle has promised there would no immediate change to Hyperion's product plans following its US$3.3 billion buyout of the business intelligence vendor.

The software giant made the promise at the recent Hyperion annual user conference where attendees were keen to learn which (if any) products would get the chop.

"The number one question I've been asked is what's going to be different moving forward," chief technology officer John Kopcke told ZDNet Australia.

Oracle officials were at pains to emphasise that following the buyout, which was only finalised one business day before the conference began, there would be no immediate change to product plans.

Oracle would also pursue a similar policy to that used in its other high-profile takeovers of PeopleSoft and Siebel, with customers promised that support would be available for all platforms as long as there was demand, executives said.

"Oracle's philosophy with any of these acquisitions is not to force companies to move if they don't want to, but to give them additional choices," said Paul Rodwick, Oracle's vice president for BI product management.

The experience of Australian customers provides some interesting examples of possible future patterns for consolidation as it pursues that product vision.

When Qantas began planning its migration to its new eQ financial management platform last year, it had originally planned to have an entirely Oracle-based solution.

However, Oracle itself suggested that Hyperion's software would be better for the complex financial consolidations required than its own product. Suzanne Young, group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation, said that the buyout would make no practical difference to the rollout plans for eQ.

Resources company Oxiana is another key customer for Hyperion in Australia, and it will be one of the first organisations in the world to move onto System 9.3, the latest version of Hyperion's integrated platform for performance management.

That system is already in use for its test and development servers, and will be rolled out within the next few weeks across the company, Oxiana group manager for planning analysis and reporting Keith Mayes said. "We're using virtually all the new features in the platform."

Oxiana adopted Hyperion's planning tools last year as part of a strategy to reduce dependence on unshared spreadsheets for tracking key metrics.

"I don't think there's a spreadsheet we've looked at yet where we can't find something that's not quite right," he said.

Getting a "single version of the truth", a common mantra for business managers, required a more rigorous strategy. "Our approach has been to take what users do, only do it much better."

What next for the brand?
A common source of concern amongst SAP customers is whether Oracle's longstanding rivalry with SAP will undermine Hyperion's previous efforts to market its analytical tools to the German software giant's customers.

Kopcke argued that having invested considerable effort in working with SAP's software, Hyperion was not about to abandon that strategy. "Customers want the major vendors to work with each other so they can choose the most appropriate solutions," he said.

While Hyperion's high-end financial analysis tools have generally been viewed as superior to Oracle's, there is quite a degree of common ground in each company's more general business intelligence tools, though officials were keen to downplay the problem.

"There is very little product overlap; there's plenty of time to work on that," Hyperion president Godfrey Sullivan noted during his opening address. Officials haven't even yet worked out the extent to which Hyperion will be maintained as a separate brand.

"We see a lot of recognition in the Hyperion brand, so there seems to be some value in retaining that," Rodwick said.

"Where it makes sense, we might change the names of some products to better communicate how they integrate together, but we certainly see value in established brands."

Sullivan also sought to dispel the widespread perception that Oracle was a demanding buyer in takeover scenarios. "Contrary to rumour and all that, it wasn't painful -- it was great," Sullivan said. "They have been the most amazingly collaborative, congenial group of people."

The long-term vision for Oracle is to use the Hyperion tools to develop what it refers to as an enterprise performance management system, which allows financial and other performance metrics to be consistently tracked and measured against corporate goals.

"We're going to integrate all these different tools together to allow you to mix and match information," Oracle senior vice president Thomas Kurian said.

Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion.