BI at Its Best
Continued
PROFIT: How does Hyperion fit into this strategy?
KURIAN: When we looked at what customers wanted in an enterprise performance management system, we saw that Oracle had a crucial set of assets. First, based on our acquisition of the Sunopsis product line, now called Oracle Data Integrator, we had a market-leading, best-of-breed, heterogeneous data integration platform. Second, we had a comprehensive set of business intelligence tools in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. We had added Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher as a new reporting capability. Third, we had unique differentiation compared to other BI vendors and applications vendors with the operational analytic applications under the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications family, including Sales Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Financial Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics, and Human Resources Analytics.
What we lacked was a world-class suite for the financial management side of the business, which would handle financial planning, budgeting, consolidation, reporting, and data quality. So, the Hyperion acquisition was really about filling out our product line in that market space with a complementary suite of products. Hyperion also brought with it some great technology assets with its Essbase OLAP [online analytical processing] engine and its BI+ tools. This combination of products would enable Oracle to quickly offer customers our vision for a complete and integrated enterprise performance management system.
PROFIT: What business trends are driving this combination?
KURIAN: Enterprise performance management is a rapidly growing software segment. Analysts estimate that it will reach about US$7 billion in 2009, growing by double digits every year. The reason for the quick growth is that it's become a top priority for financial executives and company boards of directors. Financial planning, which traditionally has been the focus of these solutions, is now being brought in by organizations to span not just the financial part of the business but also their operational lines. To gain better control of the business, companies want to complement their financial planning solutions with sales, human resources, and marketing planning, and other solutions. Today there are no great tools out there—aside from Hyperion's—to do such planning. To make performance management really work, you need to integrate the performance management system with two important capabilities. It has to be integrated with your operational systems; that is, the ERP and CRM systems from which you pull the data that drives your planning and allows you to measure how you're working against the plan. Also, you need to integrate it with the analytic systems—your data warehouses, business intelligence tools, and operational analytic applications.
In our view, it is the combination of the transaction systems [ERP and CRM], the business intelligence tools and applications, and the financial performance management solutions that will allow us to offer customers an integrated end-to-end view of financial plans tied with the operational systems.
PROFIT: How will Oracle customers benefit?
KURIAN: Oracle Applications customers and Oracle's technology and BI customers will get enormous value from this acquisition. If you're an Oracle Applications customer running Oracle Financials or PeopleSoft Financials, you get the world's best financial management solution to complement your investment in Oracle's enterprise applications. It allows you to link the operational side of the business where you run Oracle ERP applications with the financial side of the business. The value of such a combination is that customers are going to get better information from this system. They get the ability to drive better plans that can be better aligned with how they are performing operationally and, as a result, they will get better financial performance as well as operational performance.
If you are a customer using Oracle's BI tools or Oracle's database, the combined suite of Oracle Business Intelligence [Enterprise Edition] and Hyperion's tools really offer the most complete and best suite of business intelligence tools in the market. Our BI tools suite spans query and analysis, relational reporting, online analytical processing with the Essbase product from Hyperion, Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher for reporting and publishing, Hyperion's scorecard for measuring how you're doing, and Oracle Data Integrator for data integration and ETL. No other vendor offers as broad and as competitive a toolset as we offer for business intelligence.
