With its purchase of Brio Software expected to close
later this month, business intelligence software maker Hyperion
Solutions is already setting out its development priorities for
integrating the two product lines.
Hyperion bought out the financially troubled Brio, a reporting
and querying tools supplier, in July for $142m. The deal is
expected to officially close on 16 October, with a product road map
to be made available later this year.
Chief technology officer John Kopcke said Hyperion will create a
common services architecture which will allow end users to do
things like have a single sign-on for both products.
Additional product integration plans include tying together the
Brio 8 application with Hyperion's Business Performance Management
(BPM) suite, which is due in the fourth quarter. This will allow
users to craft reports that combine operational data from existing
ERP and transactional systems with finance-related data from
Hyperion's BPM software, which, in turn should enable users to
determine the profitability of a given business process.
Through 2004, Hyperion will further integrate products such as
Brio Metrics Builder with the Hyperion Platform business
intelligence infrastructure software, and it intends to showcase
its enterprise metrics road map in the first quarter of the
year.
By next spring, Hyperion will demonstrate technology that allows
users to carry out a full range of querying, reporting and analysis
activities from a single interface.
"Hyperion's acquisition of Brio brought a zombie back from the
near dead," said Mike Schiff, an analyst at Current Analysis. "Brio
is being taken seriously again."
Schiff noted that while there is some overlap in the two product
lines, Hyperion's technology is generally geared for high-end
online analytical processing functions, while Brio specialises in
ease-of-use business intelligence products.
Marc L Songini writes for
Computerworld