systematicHR

So Oracle continues its spending spree.  The ERP’s already have the best data warehouse products around.  Oracle has PeopleSoft EPM and their purchase of Siebel also included components they could integrate with their other offerings.  SAP has BW (business warehouse) which I think might be the strongest warehouse around.  But the point is if Oracle already has EPM and Siebel (and their own original tools too), what are they doing going out to buy Hyperion?  Certainly EPM’s own data warehouse engines are far more mature than any point solution like Hyperion, Cognos or Business Objects.

Originally I had thought that Oracle’s road to Fusion would look something like EPM with some added functionality from the Siebel product line and the Siebel reporting engine sitting on top of the whole thing for end users.  With the Hyperion acquisition Fusion just gets that much more confusing and perhaps considerably more difficult for Oracle to build.  If Fusion applications (yes – please make the distinction between product and infrastructure) is supposed to be out in a few years, why would they add a component this late in the game?  Now they will need to determine the new product strategy and integrate all the components into a nice package that plays well together.  Yes, I understand that SOA is a nice theory, but let’s face it, retooling Hyperion to make its code fully interoperable with other Oracle components is not a small task.  Already Oracle has the eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel to grapple with.  Isn’t that enough?

What might be more interesting is the business intelligence marketplace.  If Hyperion gets swallowed up by Oracle, who’s to say that Cognos and Business Objects are not next?  Rumors already abound that IBM might be looking and these vendors would actually do well to get acquired by someone with much more R&D dollars.  IBM’s own acquisition spree (including the recent FileNet CRM purchase) could be mightily enhanced by a nice BI vendor.  In fact, it makes much more sense for someone like IBM or Microsoft to go looking than for Oracle.  Oracle already has market leading tools.  We’ll see what happens, but again, Oracle makes a move that just makes their direction confusing… again.