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Possible acquirers
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Possible targets
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Conclusion
Verix, SeaTab, Adaptive Planning and Oco are by no means the only attractive acquisition candidates with hosted BI-related services. LucidEra, probably the best-known startup in this space, is another. Several consulting companies including OnDemandIQ, which has a hosted dashboard and reporting service and Certica Solutions, which has a hosted data quality service, are also possible acquisition candidates. It remains to be seen which of these players will remain independent. But what is clear to us is that the sector in which all these vendors play will see more M&A action. And if it's not led by Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, then HP (NYSE: HPQ) or IBM (NYSE: IBM) – given both players' BI ambitions – could well be the ones in the M&A driving seat.
Microsoft has announced two new CTP programs:
1. Management Reporter is a reporting application designed to enable information workers to take control of their business by creating and analyzing feature rich reports. It is an application tailored to general users for creating, maintaining, deploying and viewing boardroom quality financial statements. Users can easily monitor the health of the business and quickly understand what’s happening at any point in time. Management Reporter integrates with the General Ledger (GL) system or Financial Data Mart (FDM) allowing users to run financial statements within minutes after installing the application.
2. The Data Integration Toolkit is a set of software, documentation, and samples designed to enable partners and customers to expose data from financial source systems in a standardized, contextual format for use in reporting, planning, monitoring and analytics scenarios.
Oracle's announcement of its intent to purchase Hyperion on March 1 signifies this growing trend, Hagerty says. "Oracle positioned this acquisition as an extension of its overall BI strategy." The acquisitions won't stop there; Hagerty speculates that SAP, IBM, and HP might be "likely acquirers in this market space," he says. "Business Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, and Information Builders are potential targets, among a host of smaller players."
Oracle's $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion Solutions is an example of the ways in which BI is changing. It merges two distinct areas - business analytics and corporate performance management - that could start a land grab for pure-play vendors by the likes of SAP, IBM and Microsoft, said analysts, who often cite Cognos and Business Objects as targets and IBM as the likely first mover.
The implications of these companies giving BI more attention and development is that the goal of ubiquitous business intelligence could happen more quickly than previous efforts of pure-play vendors.
"[With the goal of BI] becoming part of the fabric of how you get to information about your business, rather than just a tool set, the question is, how do you make that part of what you do to fit into all these places [in the enterprise]?" said John Hagerty, an analyst with AMR Research.
"Putting BI in applications will go the furthest, fastest. This is where the fight is being made between Oracle and SAP."
In acquiring Hyperion, with its expertise in analytics and financial planning and budgeting, Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., is bringing together two distinct areas - BI and corporate performance management. The result is users will be able to manage their planning life-cycles more efficiently, said Rick Schultz, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's said that things like ETL, reporting, query and analysis and even data mining are well past the hype cycle and are moving up on the "plateau of productivity." Corporate performance management and business application data warehouses are just coming out of the "trough of disillusionment" whereas things like dashboards are just heading into the trough.
"A lot of people got excited about dashboards and scorecards -- kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme," said Hostmann. "Now they're asking, 'do these really help me manage my business and are they tied to our overall strategy.'"
Cresting the "peak of inflated expectations" are data warehousing appliances, while still ascending that slope are technologies including SOA-Enabled BI, business activity monitoring, text mining, master data management and in-memory analytics.
Hostmann put forward at least two predictions. First, he said that by 2009, some 60 percent of organizations will start shifting their attention from just managing structured data in data ware houses to adding unstructured information -- as in content management, search, XML, taxonomies and ontologies. What he's talking about is the "information management" view being cultivated by IBM, Oracle and others providing information infrastructure.Second, Hostmann said current Gartner surveys show that buyers are still interested in best-of-breed BI, but raising more than a few vendor eyebrows, he predicted that by 2010, "good enough" technologies offered in single, low-priced bundle -- from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP -- will claim the lion's share of the BI market.
"Heterogeneity is still going to rule the enterprise way beyond 2010," later commented Keith Gile, former Forrester analyst and now a senior advisor to Business Objects. "'Good enough' is not good enough for Business Objects or its customers."
Oracle announced a deal today to acquire Hyperion Solutions, which makes software that allows corporations to analyze and track their performance, for about $3.3 billion.
The deal is the latest trophy in a long string of acquisitions by Oracle, the database software giant that has been struggling to grow from within. Under terms of the deal, Oracle will pay $52 a share in cash for each share of Hyperion, a 21 percent premium over Wednesday’s closing price of $42.84. The deal is expected to close in April.
“The acquisition of Hyperion makes Oracle the category leader in the high-growth enterprise performance management market,” Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, said in a statement.
Oracle has long been known as one of the most aggressive acquirers of technology companies. Hyperion, which has more than 12,000 customers worldwide, including 91 Fortune 100 companies, sells analytic applications that aggregate data from corporate accounting systems for financial reporting. Such software is crucial in helping CFOs keep in step with federal compliance regulations.
Hyperion also offers planning and budgeting applications, which financial executives use to run businesses every day. The acquisition, which Oracle expects to close in April, will also give the software giant more leverage against SAP, the German applications giant Oracle has been targeting as its chief foe since it began snapping up applications vendors with a vengeance four years ago.
Hyperion is one of the last pieces to complete Oracle’s strategy. Founded in 1981 as IMRS, Hyperion has grown into one of the biggest makers of business analysis software through its Hyperion System 9 suite. Hyperion itself has grown through a series of deals, notably a 1998 merger with Arbor Software that brought the popular Essbase database software program into its fold.
"With Hyperion, we will be adding a leading enterprise planning system, a high-growth, leading financial consolidation solution, a powerful OLAP engine... and a global sales organization with over 1,900 sales and consulting professionals dedicated to business intelligence." Ventana Research CEO Mark Smith said Hyperion thinks the key to the deal is its strength in finance applications. "Oracle did not have a good footing in the office of finance, and this is the bulk of rationale behind it, but obviously some additional BI depth does not hurt,"
BI software, which IDC and Gartner estimate is a multi-billion-dollar market, enables corporations to gain more insight into the way their employees and business processes are performing.
Oracle already sells a complete BI suite, Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g, but adding Hyperion will give the software giant new corporate performance management tools and a large customer base.
Read complete article here.
Business Objects Performance Management User Conference to Spotlight Industry Best Practices, Innovative Products, and Customer Success
Business Objects, the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced details for its annual performance management user conference, Business Objects Insight Performance Management 2007. The event, taking place March 11 – 14 at the Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida, will address the future of performance management and how companies can leverage Business Objects solutions to improve overall planning, budgeting, and reporting efforts. The conference will allow customers to update their product knowledge, network with others from the finance community, and meet Business Objects executives and technical experts.
Leaders' performances excel in the CPM suite market segment. They're able to deliver breadth and depth of CPM suite functionality, as well as provide enterprisewide implementations to support a broad CPM strategy. Leaders successfully articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis.
Challengers provide offerings that are complementary to their established business applications. In doing so, they expect to leverage their installed client bases. They typically offer good breadth of functionality, but their solutions are primarily tied to their own applications. Challengers may also have a limited vision of CPM that isn't well-aligned with Gartner's vision of where CPM is heading.
Visionaries have a strong vision for delivering a CPM suite. They are distinguished by the openness and flexibility of their application architectures, and they offer depth of functionality in the areas they address, but they may have gaps relative to broader functionality requirements. A visionary vendor is a market "thought leader" and innovator; however, it may have yet to achieve sufficient scale, or there may be concerns about its capability to grow and provide consistent execution.
Niche vendors do well in a specific segment of the CPM suite market, or have limited capability to innovate or outperform other vendors in the market. They may be focused on a specific domain or aspect of CPM, and are likely to lack depth of functionality, or they may have gaps relative to broader CPM suite functionality requirements. Niche vendors may have reasonably broad CPM suites, but limited implementation and support capabilities and relatively limited customer bases, or they may not have achieved the necessary scale to solidify their market positions. Some have limited geographic presence outside their "home" regions.
Hyperion has maintained its high brand recognition among CFOs and finance professionals, which means that it is present in virtually every CPM suite evaluation. Hyperion strengthened its offering with release 9.0 of its applications. This leveraged the new Hyperion System 9 BI platform as a more consistent underlying foundation for its main CPM applications, Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management. The System 9 BI platform includes enhanced Web analysis and financial reporting capabilities and also provides common user management capabilities. Hyperion recently introduced new capital asset-planning capabilities and launched BPM Architect, which enables users to create custom CPM applications and process flows. Hyperion continues to show strong overall vision and market presence, although it upset its users by charging an upgrade fee for release 9.0. This created disquiet, but despite this, and the fact that Hyperion generally is the highest-cost option in most evaluations, it continues to maintain a leadership position. However, Hyperion faces growing competition from other vendors, and users should be aware of this during negotiations.
Cognos has been realigning its sales and marketing focus around a more comprehensive performance management message, of which CPM is an important part. It feels this will help it win more strategic business in large enterprises against Hyperion and SAP. Although this makes sense, it has resulted in patchy execution in the CPM suites space during the past year, especially in the EMEA and APAC regions. However, once Cognos rolls this model out globally it will be well-positioned to leverage the growing focus among larger enterprises on a broader approach to performance management. At a tactical level, Cognos is now widely recognized as a leading CPM suites vendor and continues to do well in planning-led deals. It is also appearing in more midmarket opportunities, where the combination of CPM functionality and underlying BI platform is appealing to CIOs. Cognos has focused on augmenting its solutions through performance "blueprints" (developed by its Innovation Center) that provide pre-defined models for functional and vertical CPM and performance management processes. The blueprints are downloadable by customers, which enables Cognos to deliver value-add functionality without requiring users to upgrade their underlying systems. Overall, Cognos remains a leader in the CPM space and is well-placed to capitalize on the blurring of the BI and CPM market boundaries.
Hi! Lemme introduce myself.
I am Abdul Aleem. I am pursuing MBA in Information Technology from Symbiosis, Pune.
I started this blog to write about my experiences, learnings etc. during my internship at Sonata Software Limited, Bangalore.
I will be working on Microsoft Office PerfomancePoint Server 2007.
The tasks assigned to me are:
