OK, I have no idea what’s going on here… Hyperion have announced a series of initiatives to allow their BI tools to be used with Microsoft’s. Of course it’s presented as them being responsive to customer opinion, but you can’t help wonder if there’s a hidden agenda too. Is this some kind of anti-Oracle gesture?
Hyperion and Microsoft to collaborate on BI!?!?
Mosha also mentioned this nostalgically in his blog:
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http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/archive/2006/04/25/microsoft_hyperion_collaborate.aspx
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P.S. It is symbolic in a sense. I still have my "Wired for OLAP" t-shirt from 1997 which I got when AppSource announced support for OLAP Services 7.0. Of course, it was later bought by Arbor, which merged with Hyperion, and support for OLAP Services/Analysis Services was discontinued then. Glad too see it coming back after 9 years 🙂
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For those of us familiar with the erstwhile "Wired For OLAP" product, it\’s indeed deja vu all over again (to borrow from Yogi Berra\’s memorable malapropisms). We were using Wired to access both Essabase and MS OLAP cubes for a while, till Hyperion declared that the "market adoption rate of MS OLAP didn\’t warrant its continued support". Well, I guess things have sure changed since then!
This move really makes no sense to me whatsoever. Microsoft has products like ProClarity and Analysis Services that are direct competitors to Hyperion\’s products and offer equal and in many cases better functionality. I think this just opens the door to Microsoft walking in to an account and saying "hello Ms. Customer, how about getting the same solution that Hyperion is giving you for 1/3 price on the Microsoft Stack? We\’ll even migrate you for free!" Net-net, brilliant move by Microsoft, incomprehensible by Hyperion.