According to Gartner, Oracle's pact to acquire Hyperion, a vendor of business intelligence and corporate performance management software for $3.3 billion won't lead to major short-term product changes. But customers should ask for a road map once the deal closes.

Gartner believes that Oracle will maintain multiple independent product lines for its CPM suites and BI platform products for the future and also support integration to applications from vendors such as SAP, Microsoft and Infor.

However, the acquisition will create some dubiousness over Oracle's longer-term CPM product strategies. Oracle has previously said that the current Oracle CPM suite will form the foundation of Oracle's Fusion CPM suite. However, Oracle has since acknowledged the limited success of its CPM budgeting and planning applications. Hence, Oracle should base its future CPM portfolio around the Hyperion product line.

Gartner observes that the purchase will also create uncertainty over Oracle's longer-term BI platform strategies. In the near term, Oracle will enable data-access-level integration between the Hyperion BI platform and Oracle's business and analytic applications. In the long term, Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition will become the predominant BI platform for its business and analytic applications. However, any plans to integrate and standardize technologies across Oracle's multiple BI platform products could take several release cycles to complete.

The deal also brings with it a large installed base of the Hyperion Essbase online analytical processing (OLAP) server technology, which competes with Oracle OLAP. Hyperion BI platform products worked with Oracle technology, but have not previously supported the Oracle OLAP option. Gartner maintains that Oracle will eventually make Hyperion Planning, built on Essbase, available on Oracle OLAP.

Recommendations
• Enterprises considering Oracle's BI platform or Hyperion's BI platform: Continue your evaluation process independently, since the products each have distinct capabilities. Any integration assumptions would be purely speculative at this point.

• Enterprises evaluating Oracle CPM and PeopleSoft enterprise performance management (EPM) products: Continue your evaluation and consider the Hyperion CPM suite as a short-term competitor.

• Enterprises that have either the Oracle CPM or PeopleSoft EPM suites: Continue with your investments on the assumption that Oracle will extend its Applications Unlimited strategy to these products.

• All Oracle and Hyperion customers: Ask Oracle for a road map that includes integration and pricing/support plans and costs once the acquisition is complete.