For Business Process & Applications Professionals (Length: 6 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

With the announcement of the Hyperion acquisition, Oracle did, again, what it does best — made a bold play to absorb a key competitor's technology and customer base. While this acquisition appears to be primarily focused on Hyperion's strong financial applications business, it also significantly improves Oracle's position in business intelligence (BI) — two segments that are complementary and hot. The acquisition will increase Oracle's pressure on the remaining pure-play BI and business performance solution (BPS) vendors, but even more importantly on IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. First, however, Oracle must sort out numerous product overlaps and redundancies to squeeze value from the $3.3 billion investment.