Just three days after the
Business Objects and Crystal Decisions merger announcement,
Hyperion and
Brio have announced a merger. Why? Hyperion appears to be filling out its line card. By integrating Brio's Performance Suite and Metrics Builder into its offerings, Hyperion will be able to offer a more complete set of products, from advanced query and analysis to financial analysis and performance dashboards. This will allow Hyperion to offer less sophisticated prospects tools to do basic reporting against transactional systems while providing them an upgrade path to more complex business performance indicator (KPI) scorecards and dashboards. Hyperion's flagship product is its Essbase OLAP system.
But some observers don't see the need for business intelligence vendors to offer a complete suite of products. An
Internet News article quotes analyst Mark Smith, of Ventana Research. "We believe the Hyperion acquisition of Brio is not a significant move that will impact the BI or Performance Management market," he said. "Since Hyperion had little traction with the OEM of Crystal Enterprise over the last year and half in a product called Hyperion Q&R, there does not seem to be any real demand by customers or push-traction by Hyperion in selling query and reporting." With competitor Business Objects now acquiring Crystal Decisions, I'm wondering if Hyperion will continue the OEM relationship for Crystal Enterprise.
The combined Hyperion/Brio entity will have revenues of $613 million, 2,700 employees, and over 16,000 customers worldwide.
Send tips, rumors, gossip, and feedback to Frank Scavo at
. I'm especially interested in hearing about best practices, lessons learned, horror stories, and case studies of success or failure.
