Oracle buys Hyperion, turns heat on SAP
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Mixes with new crowd Oracle is ending its brief acquisition lull with one of its largest software deals. The database giant will buy Hyperion Solutions, also an Oracle competitor in the business intelligence market and an important partner of SAP, for $3.3bn, or $52 a share - a handsome 21 per cent premium for stockholders.â¦
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It has agreed that the company should be sold to Oracle for $26.50 a share, roughly $10.3 billion, $1.5 billion more than Oracle&#39;s now-famous &quot;best and final&quot; offer.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle has increased the price it is willing to pay for an additional stake in i-flex solutions, a vendor of financial software in Mumbai, India. The move follows a period of sharp increases in company valuations on India's stock market, and Oracle may have felt that increasing its offer was necessary to make its offer more attractive for i-flex shareholders, analysts said. Oracle, of Redwood Shores, California, said Thursday said it has increased its offer price to 2,100 Indian rupees ($47) per share, including interest. The company also said that it has raisedÂ to about 35 percent the number of shares it has agreed to buy in the pending open offer to i-flex shareholders. The new open offer price is a 42 percent premium to the 1,475 rupees per share that Oracle first offered, and a 20 per cent premium to i-flex's closing stock price on Thursday of 1,751 rupees. Indian stock markets are booming, and investor expectations are high, said a financial analyst who declined to be named. Oracle may have not found sufficient support for the offer at its earlier price, he said. The price of i-flex's shares has risen by over 52 percent in the last six months. Oracle informed the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in September that it intended to acquire an additional 20 percent of the equity of i-flex. It already holds a 55 percent stake in the company. Oracle would be paying about $531 million for the additional stake. Oracle subsequently delayed the open date of the offer from Nov. 6 to Dec. 4. In an statement to the BSE on Friday, i-flex said that Oracle had increased the number of shares it wanted to purchase in the open offer from the earlier 16.63 million to 28.39 million, representing 34.14 percent of the emerging voting capital. An i-flex spokeswoman declined to comment on the new offer. Oracle will be paying about $1.3 billion for the additional equity if its offer sails through. The open offer closes on Dec. 23.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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As Oracle embarks on one of the software industry's largest acquisitions in history with its $10.3 billion purchase of PeopleSoft, it needs to show it can chew what it has bitten off.
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Oracle has agreed to buy BEA Systems for around $8.5 billion, the two companies announced today.
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Some users and analysts fear that Oracle&#8217;s planned $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion will cut the negotiating leverage of customers and result in a decrease in product upgrades.
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The database software said it would buy Hyperion, which makes business analysis software, for $3.3 billion.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle has agreed to acquire business intelligence software vendor Hyperion SolutionsÂ for $3.3 billion in cash, it said Thursday. Oracle said it will combine Hyperion's software with its own business intelligence and analytics tools to offer customers a broad range of performance management capabilities, including planning, budgeting and operational analytics. The deal, the latest big purchase by Oracle following its acquisitions of applications vendorsÂ PeopleSoft,Â Siebel Systems,Â and others, will expand Oracle's portfolio of database, applications and middleware products with a set of business intelligence products. These are used by companies to collect and analyze information about their businesses. It will continueÂ Oracle's strategyÂ of growing its revenue and customer base through big acquisitions. But it will also present the challenge of integrating yet another large company into a business that is still absorbing the products and employees of PeopleSoft and other acquisitions. The companies hope to close the acquisition by April, subject to customary closing conditions. Oracle has agreed to pay $52 per share for Hyperion, or about $3.3 billion, a premium of 21 percent over Hyperion's closing share price Wednesday. Part of Oracle's motivation for the deal appears to be to poach customers from its chief applications rival SAP: Many SAP customers use Hyperion software, and the acquisition will bring them closer to Oracle, said Oracle President Charles Phillips in a statement. Hyperion has 12,000 customers using its software, and about 2,500 employees spread over 20 countries, according to information on its Web site. It reported revenue of $765.2 million for the fiscal year to June 30, 2006. Earlier this year Oracle was rumored to have been in acquisition talks with Hyperion rival Business Objects, of Paris. In the past, Oracle executives have discussed improving the business intelligence capabilities in its Oracle database, and buying Hyperion could potentially give the company a selling point over database rival IBM. Hyperion is among IBM's business intelligence partners. But Oracle is also close partners with BI market leader Business Objects, of Paris, and is developing new products that integrate IBM's data warehousing software with Business Objects' products, sources familiar with those plans said this week. It is also a close partner of open-source business intelligence vendor Pentaho Corp. The acquisition will be at least the 27th deal Oracle has announced since the start of 2005.
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Users of technology from both companies today expressed concern about Oracle's $8.5 billion agreement to buy BEA Systems and to fold in the latter's middleware to the Oracle software stack.The BEA board of director's vote to approve the sale for $19.375 a share comes just three months after it spurned Oracle's $6.7 billion offer in October to buy the middleware vendor.Burc Oral, a senior architect at Cambridge, Mass.-based government contractor Cell Exchange, said that while the acquisition will give users the option of buying a database and application server from a single vendor, he also expects a period of "confusion" for BEA users because of technology overlap.Oral, who also heads up the New England BEA User Group, said that he expects that the deal will likely mean the end of some products -- "a little from Oracle and a lot from BEA."Oral said that Oracle would be well served to retain BEA's WebLogic product, which has a hearty following among users, who have been provided with good support from BEA over the years. "[BEA] had their [WebLogic] product out there many years before Oracle was out there," Oral said. "[It] is very easy to use and BEA has always been very friendly to the user community with downloads and documentation. Oracle doesn't have this wide acceptance from the user community in terms of applications. With BEA life is a lot easier."But, he noted that since Oracle made its first bid for BEA in October, the middleware firm has been less responsive than usual to the user group. In addition, Oral said that users from previous Oracle acquisitions including Siebel and Hyperion appear to be "getting better value" from a larger organization that they did before the acquisition.Jim Burgard, assistant vice chancellor of university computing and communication at the University of New Orleans, said that he doesn't expect the deal to significantly impact his organization, which uses WebLogic with Oracle's PeopleSoft applications. However, he added that he "does have some concerns about future licensing and maintenance costs now that all the components are owned by one vendor."Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that Burgard's fear is not unfounded, noting that there is a chance that support costs for users of BEA's WebLogic Server, AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic BPM, WebLogic Event Server, and AquaLogic SOA Management products will grow after the deal closes later this year.Gilpin did note that Oracle has promised "lifetime support" for BEA products that overlap Oracle's offerings. That means that BEA users won't have to dump their BEA products but may over time pay more for support, he said. If they do move to Oracle's technology, they'll have to pay for migration, Gilpin added."Oracle has assured us that they will be very mindful of protecting the interests of existing BEA customers, just as they have been for customers of PeopleSoft and Siebel -- and I find their assurances credible," Gilpin said "It's not in Oracle's interest to aggravate these customers, In many cases they are already Oracle customers, anyway."Todd Langille, project manager of Administrative Computing for Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., said that he has concerns over whether Oracle has a "clear coherent strategy" for its growing software portfolio, which includes many similar products.For example, he noted that Oracle bought business intelligence software vendors Hyperion and Siebel despite have its own BI tool set, Discover. "I take a look at that mix of acquisitions, and I'm not really sure what their data warehouse strategy will be with all their business intelligence products in play," he remarked.Langille did note that because Dartmouth runs both Oracle Application Server and BEA's WebLogic software, it's not as important to him which product becomes the database vendor's primary middleware offering. "We see [the acquisition] as probably a knocking down of competition, but given that we use both products, we stand to benefit from whatever intellectual properly Oracle [gains]," he added.BEA should expedite Oracle's efforts to construct a standards-based middleware architecture, Langille said. However, he acknowledged that it will take some time before any wholesale replacement for Oracle Application Server arrives."I don't think products are identical, and for that reason, I don't think one will disappear quickly," he added.Patricia Dues, enterprise program manager for the city of Las Vegas, said she hopes Oracle can use BEA technology to improve its various offerings. For example, she said she hopes software acquired from BEA can augment the analytical capability of Oracle's Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition offering recently purchased by the city."We realize what Oracle has done with other acquisitions in taking the best of both worlds. There's always room for improvement, and this sparks our interest with the acquisition of BEA," said Dues.Dues downplayed any concerns that Oracle's ongoing attrition of its software competitors - both large and small - may divert the company's focus away from existing customers or product roadmaps. "I don't see this as what Larry [Ellison] wants. I think there's a strategy behind it all. I can't say that I feel like [Oracle] is going to desert us, they have too many products to manage," she said.
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Oracle has acquired Bridgestream, a maker of software that helps companies map employee responsibilities, Oracle said Wednesday.
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.
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The combination of PeopleSoft applications with Oracle&#39;s database and middleware products could lead to a closer relationship between IBM and SAP.
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Not long after Oracle has bought Peoplesoft, it looks like another big corporate buy out is on the way. Symantec is negotiating to buy storage software vendor Veritas
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SAP (NYSE: SAP) has ratcheted up its wooing of PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) and JD Edwards customers with its acquisition of TomorrowNow, a provider of maintenance and other support for enterprise applications, including PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites.
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Oracle Corp. , the world's largest database software maker, said on Thursday it would buy rival Hyperion Solutions Corp.  for $3.3 billion, to boost its position in the market for performance management software.
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Despite having revenues of around $70 million to $85 million, MySQL commanded an impressive $1 billion price tag in today's acquisition by database giant Oracle.
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Oracle launched on Monday Oracle Data Integration Suite, which combines traditional data integration capabilities with an array of middleware and tooling for constructing a service oriented architecture.Data Integration Suite costs $60,000 per CPU for a package that bundles Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle/Hyperion Data Relationship Manager with the company's BPEL Process Manager, enterprise service bus, application server, business-to-business engine, and business rules engine, according to a statement."This is really Oracle attempting to go a long way toward providing a credible alternative to IBM Information Server," said James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research. IBM released Information Server in October 2006; the product sits at the center of the company's Information on Demand Strategy.In turn, Oracle's suite aligns its data-integration offerings with its Fusion Middleware line for SOA.Additional options in the suite include a new pair of data quality tools, Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator and Oracle Data Profiling, which the company developed with Harte-Hanks Trillium Software."Finally, Oracle now has best-of-breed data quality tools," Kobielus said.Also, Oracle is optionally offering its Coherence Data Grid, technology acquired through Oracle's purchase of Tangosol last year, and a number of adapters, including ones for applications and unstructured content, as options.The company did not provide pricing information for the optional items.Overall, the suite reflects the further integration of two key Oracle acquisitions, Sunopsis and Hyperion, into the company's core Fusion Middleware lineup, according to Kobielus. "There's a lot of Sunopsis and Hyperion DNA in this," he said.Oracle bought Sunopsis, maker of an ELT (extract, load, transform) tool in October 2006. The company plunked down $3.3 billion in March 2007 for Hyperion, which had a master data management product among its offerings.IBM, Oracle, and SAP are now the main industry contenders in terms of a truly broad data-integration suite, according to Kobielus. Other large enterprise stack vendors, such as Red Hat or Sun, might be wise to make some acquisitions in this space, he added.Marketing materials announcing the Oracle's release stress the suite's applicability to heterogenous environments, noting its support for a broad array of databases, including IBM DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and Oracle.This is telling, right down to Oracle's positioning of its own database at the end of that list, Kobielus said. "IBM is also strongly heterogeneous," he noted.