Oracle swoops for Hyperion

Oracle has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions, in a deal thought to be worth over £1.6bn.

Hyperion is a provider of performance management software solutions and Oracle believes that the acquisition will make it top dog in the enterprise performance management market.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, said, "Hyperion's EPM software coupled with Oracle's Business Intelligence (BI) tools and analytic applications form an end-to-end performance management system that includes planning, budgeting, consolidation, operational analytics and compliance reporting."

"Requirements for performance management and business intelligence solutions are increasingly converging," added Hyperion chief executive officer Godfrey Sullivan.

"Given the critical need for managers across the enterprise to align operational decisions with strategy, now is the right time for Hyperion to combine with a strategic partner like Oracle to deliver the first, integrated end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System."

The deal is hugely significant in the battle between Oracle and SAP in the BI space. A significant number of SAP customers rely on Hyperion as their financial consolidation, analysis and reporting system of record. Oracle boasts that via the newly acquired Hyperion software, its product will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyse their underlying SAP data.

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