Once Upon a Time

I was once known to the Yahoo chat board as "olap genius". I have some predictions and stuff that are now going on 9 years old. Check out this one from the archives:

The Hyperion Century
by: olap_genius (30/M/California)  05/01/99 04:00 pm
Msg: 2198 of 12844

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict the ascendancy of hysl in the coming years. so let me say it now. hysl will enter the fortune 500 within 3 years. i'm not sure what the stock will do. as long as it doesn't do anything to jeopardize the direction of the company - ie put too much control into the hands of scoundrels, then i predict the inevitability of hysl's success.

the reason is that i have just assessed the breadth of applications which are waiting to be built in the space occupied by data held capture in erp systems. it's enormous. hyperion is the only company which is poised to take advantage of all of that data because of its tight partnerships with several key players.

today, any systems integrator worth their salt could take a selection of technologies off the shelf and build killer analytical apps based on data which has migrated from the mainframe transactional systems into the client server systems created by erp. but there are two barriers:

the first is that the gorilla of the erp space, sap, has confounded the process with its proprietary staging of data. right now there seem to be only two players in the industry, acta and sagent, who are prepared and capable to extract that data with any intelligence. acta is delivering on that today with product that is shipping. they are telling stories of building data marts in less time, with less money, and more functionality than legions of consultants have done.

the second problem is that most projects that get this kind of attention are complicated by high rollers. the competent technical consultants are currently outgunned by the less competent management consultants. i get the impression that many data warehouse initiatives are inordinately prolonged by mission statement engineering. this is the inevitable result of not having appropriate experience to make the right decisions. another aspect of this problem is that inappropriate sums of money are directed at pikers and wasteful projects taking market share and credibility away from experts.

Hyperion is set to eliminate these issues and profit from its accumulated experience in doing so.

re: bold
by: olap_genius (30/M/California)  05/03/99 12:40 am
Msg: 2210 of 12844

hyperion will deal with the first problem (the erp data jail) by aggressively partnering with companies like acta and sagent. hyperion will always have a large direct sales force which will multiply the effect of acta and sagent product marketing. and the partnership will also leverage hyperion products into acta and sagent customer bases. as soon as it becomes a done deal - that is to say that best practices in jumpstarting analytic apps out of erp data - then the word will be out and market share takes off from there.

on the second point, hyperion has a significant advantage in that it is investing in and marketing its considerable experience in the financial area. they will have the best of both worlds, an inhouse set of mbas and cpas who can wrangle with the best of the big 5 and a set of dbas and implementation consultants who can match strengths with the outsourcers of the world. with this combination they will be well motivated to execute as a single provider. hopefully market forces will make themselves clear - it will be cheaper to do business with hyperion only as a single point solutions provider, than with outsourcers, management consultants and tech vendors.

Informatica ate Acta and Sagent's lunch and Hyperion abandoned operational OLAP.