Oracle Buys HyperRoll

... well, at least they bought some of HyperRoll, and frankly, it's about time. It all started back in the day when HyperRoll found a better way to roll-up Essbase data. Originally, there was scuttlebutt about Hyperion buying HyperRoll, but (so the story goes), the price was too high. So instead, Hyperion decided to create ASO which bore eerie similarities to HyperRoll. There was a nasty lawsuit involving Hyperion infringing on HyperRoll's patent that got settled eventually for millions.

By that time, though, Hyperion had ASO firmly entrenched in Essbase customers world-wide and HyperRoll somewhat disappeared from the Hyperion landscape. They made a reappearance recently with their LiveLink technology that essentially let you build Essbase cubes from HFM data really, really fast. In some cases, it was almost real-time. I saw a demo of it where a user made an elimination entry in HFM and it was visible in an Essbase cube literally 3 seconds later.

So what exactly did Oracle buy? It's unclear at the moment. HyperRoll's website proudly proclaims "Oracle Buys HyperRoll." Oracle's release is a bit more coy on what exactly they purchased:

On September 29, 2009, Oracle announced it has agreed to acquire certain assets of HyperRoll. HyperRoll is a leading provider of financial reporting acceleration solutions with interactive reporting capability to support complex data calculation requirements. Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) already enables rapid, accurate and secure financial consolidation and reporting. With the addition of HyperRoll's reporting acceleration technology, customers are expected to be able to execute a faster financial close.

HyperRoll's employees are expected to join Oracle, and will bring domain expertise in multi-dimensional technologies and algorithms for large scale financial and business intelligence systems.

In other words, they're definitely buying the parts of HyperRoll that matter to us Oracle EPM (Hyperion) junkies including the LiveLink technology mentioned above. What I can't figure out is what they're leaving behind at HyperRoll. Either way, the good news is it will all be rolled into the Oracle EPM product suite. It also mentions under the HyperRoll acquisition FAQ (scroll down to page 3) that Oracle will be increasing the R&D around the HyperRoll products.

I did find the best source of details on what Oracle is buying can be found in this 10-page presentation. It even shows where HyperRoll will be fitting in the EPM suite:

http://www.oracle.com/hyperroll/hyperroll-general-presentation.pdf