Hyperion's acquisition of Brio complicates its position in the business performance management market. Brio brings a rich background in the BI market but has limited success delivering performance management solutions to global organizations. Brio has historical success delivering query and reporting for performance measurement. Brio has had limited success with its release of Brio 8, and has significant competition from the likes of Actuate, Business Objects, Cognos, Informatica, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAP and SAS. Hyperion's lack of a strategic roadmap for performance management presents some significant hurdles that Ventana Research believes will impact its future success. Hyperion's contradictory positioning that it is not in the business intelligence market and its lack of clarity in describing how Brio complements its BPM position leads us to recommend that end user organizations wait until it presents a clear strategy.

Assessment

Ventana Research assesses the Hyperion performance management strategy using our process to understand, optimize, and align performance. We still find some minor gaps in Hyperion's ability at the optimize and align steps, and more significant gaps in Brio's ability to support the optimize step. A critical piece of missing functionality important to Hyperion customers is Brio Metrics Builder's lack of support for Hyperion Essbase XTD, which will have to be resolved in the short term.

Hyperion bases its current business performance management strategy on a suite of financial performance management applications that enable a CFO to understand, optimize and align financial processes and performance through consolidations, budgeting, planning, modeling, analysis and reporting. Ventana Research believes Hyperion should focus future efforts on building a more robust financial performance management solution set focused on meeting the evolving needs of the CFO and finance organization in regards to compliance issues like Sarbanes-Oxley. These solutions should include the capabilities to support financial processes that enable document authentication along pre-defined workflows.

The next area that Hyperion must address is line-of-business performance management solutions beyond finance. Hyperion has not sufficiently addressed customer, supply chain, operations and workforce business domains. While Hyperion has customers and partners providing solutions in these areas, they do not operate in an integrated fashion across the enterprise to support a broader integrated business performance management strategy. This puts Hyperion at a disadvantage compared to other suppliers - Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and SAS - that have evolved their offerings in an integrated fashion. Ventana Research believes Hyperion should further embrace an integrated solution set. It should look closely at Informatica, which recently de-emphasized its analytic application solution set and is looking for OEM partners.

Ventana Research believes the acquisition of Brio will not immediately enhance Hyperion's position in the performance management market. Brio brings experience in understanding and communicating performance, but we must wait to see if it can assist and influence Hyperion server and tools development teams in expanding their capabilities and information architecture.

This acquisition brings overlapping capabilities in dashboards and scorecarding: the Brio Metrics Builder goes up against Hyperion Performance Scorecard and Hyperion Analyzer for dashboarding. Ventana Research believes that a blending of tools and technologies will result in a new toolset in the long term that will win out over existing offerings. Because of Hyperion shifting its BI strategy from Crystal Decisions to Brio Hyperion customers should take some time to pull back and examine Hyperion's overall scorecard and dashboard strategy.

Market Impact

Ventana Research believes that the combination of Hyperion and Brio will not provide any significant new opportunities for Hyperion's business performance management strategy. While Hyperion has acquired Brio's aging customer base with little traction on Brio Metrics Builder, it will continue to face competition in performance management technologies like scorecarding and performance measurement technologies like dashboards. This competition comes from Actuate, Business Objects, Corvu, Cognos, Informatica, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Oracle, PB Views, PeopleSoft and SAP.

Hyperion's shift and expansion of their BI platform and tools is similar to the recent Business Objects acquisition of Crystal Decisions. Hyperion will require some time to develop and execute on a strategy that will result in new and evolved products.

Recommendation

Organizations looking to employ financial performance management should still consider Hyperion. Ventana Research believes that organizations wanting enterprise scorecarding and dashboard capabilities should still consider Hyperion (along with other BI and scorecarding providers) though Hyperion and Brio products operate on top of three different server technologies. Hyperion will have to rationalize the overlapping technologies and build a common platform to support the whole spectrum of performance management capabilities. With Brio, Hyperion can further develop its query and reporting offerings, commonly called performance measurement. However, the lack of demand we've seen for the existing Hyperion/Crystal Decisions offerings, and the overlap of functionality with existing offerings must be analyzed and rationalized before end user organizations make purchase decisions.