I'm ramping up some of my comments over at the HYSL Yahoo board and bringing some exclusive details here. There has been some speculation there that Oracle might acquire Hyperion. I think the HYSL board is doing everything it can to avoid that fate and may be looking to do some acquisition itself. With their recent OEM announcement about Tableau, i think they're being pretty wise about making the Hyperion platform very robust. As I have said and others have speculated, Tableau is very exciting stuff.
On the acquisition side, there are only two pieces missing from the Hyperion platform puzzle. One would be an application API and toolkit that would be widely acceptable to the development community and the second would be an ETL tool.
There might be a third, depending on how closely Hyperion integrates with Teradata's Active DW strategy, which would be some links to EAI and messaging streams, but there's not a real demand for that in Hyperion's marketplace - certainly little the HYSL sales guys might pitch.
Right now all HYSL needs to do is concentrate on getting Essbase covering all the bases that MSAS will cover, and I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to pull it off materially.
The buzz had been that the ETL acquisition would be Ascential. Way back in the day, I did some joint presentations with them when they were Data Stage. But IBM bought them recently and are rebranding it under Websphere. The strange thing about that is that IBM purchased the other half of the company before and made Ascential in the first place. But ETL is ETL and in 18 months, Hyperion engineering could bolt whatever goodies it has to EIS and integrate the whole thing nicely. Hyperion would be a full service DB company and with the next generation of MySQL do most everything with no outside assistance. So let's put two and two together shall we? The VP of sales at an upstart ETL company called Pervasive is Chip Harmon, who used to run Hyperion Sales in the US. Pervasive's stock is just above 4 bucks and they have fewer than 300 employees. Their specialty is Midcap accounting. This could be a match made in heaven.
Hell on earth is getting data out of the little accounting packages like MAS, Solomon and Great Plains. That's where I lived for two years, mucking around with SQL Server, MSAS and ProClarity. If Hyperion can hit the pricepoints of that whole sector, there's only one word for the result: Domination. That's what I'm hoping for.
You call Tableau "very exciting stuff." I won't dispute that, but have you looked into Inxight's TableLens, which has been out for several years? It's not graphical in the same way as Tableau, but it does have an analogous visual approach to exploring tabular data.
Seth
Posted by: Seth Grimes | June 12, 2005 at 03:21 PM
I've taken a look at TableLens. I like it a lot. I could definitely use that as an analytical tool.
Posted by: mbowen | August 05, 2005 at 03:05 PM