March 7, 2007

Hyperion Acquisition

The news last week was that Oracle plans to acquire Hyperion Solutions (and in this case, the target agrees). So what? Who is Hyperion?

Hyperion is a "business performance management" software company. It describes its product as...well, you can read all about it at hyperion.com. The system Hyperion sells is composed of many parts. Some may overlap what Oracle already provides, but Hyperion has 12,000 customers and just maybe Oracle has taken notice of that fact. Anyway, buried in a little corner of Hyperion's system is...SQR (although it seems to have lost this name along the way and is now just a "reporting" solution).

But we already have SQR, right? Sort of. SQR has been passed through a very long chain of companies through marketing and development agreements and acquisitions. PeopleSoft redistributed SQR with its products for many years. Around the year 2000 (at SQR version 6.1.4), PeopleSoft purchased rights to the source code. There were some bug fixes, but I'm not aware of any significant development past that point. Hyperion eventually acquired the product through its acquisition of Brio Software and continued development. Hyperion's SQR is currently at version 9 and contains a number of features that the PeopleSoft version doesn't have. The PeopleSoft version is now known by the PeopleTools version number (e.g., 8.4 or whatever you might have), but it's still essentially the old SQR version 6x.

Oracle, of course, ended up with PS SQR and will now have Hyperion SQR as well. Will the latest version be distributed with upgrades? Or will the old version stay in use until it just fades away or is replaced with something better? Referring to the two versions will be interesting, as we will now have Oracle SQR version 9 (really 6) vs. Oracle SQR version 9 (really 9). Guess I'll just go on calling them PeopleSoft SQR and Hyperion SQR. (The debugger currently supports both versions.)

Until next time...