Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

IBM and Hyperion Part Ways Maybe : "On July 21, I got a surprising email
from Stephanie Clark - IBM’s Analyst Relations person. In it, she states that
IBM and Hyperion are ending their OEM agreement and each company will go its
merry way. Read on — it gets even stranger.

Bottom line from the email? IBM will no longer offer new sales of DB2 OLAP
Server (IBM’s version of Hyperion’s Essbase) to its customers. Current DB2 OLAP
Server customers have the opportunity to migrate to Hyperion’s version of
Essbase as of July 21st."

Interesting blog article from Claudia Imhoff, and it looks like
IBM’s recent aquisition of
Alphablox means that their OEM relationship with Hyperion is on the way out.
IBM had a reseller agreement with Hyperion to distribute Essbase, and part of
the arrangement was that IBM got to sell a version of Essbase that stored it’s
data in a DB2 star schema rather than an Essbase multdimensional database. I
guess that just like Oracle OLAP, and Microsoft Analysis Services, although the
ROLAP option is there nobody actually uses it in reality, so I can’t imagine too
many customers will be disadvantaged, and most that did use it will probably
have migrated to multidimensional Essbase or products such as Analysis Services
some time ago.

UPDATE : Nigel Pendse dropped me a line to point out that IBM
abandoned the old ROLAP version of Essbase some years ago. What they’ve been
reselling recently is just a rebadged version of the multidimensional version of
Essbase, which in fact worked just as well running against an Oracle or SQL
Server database. Nigel’s opinion is actually that the Essbase move isn’t much to
do with IBM’s aquisition of Alphablox; in fact it’s more to do with their
current focus on their Cube Views product, which in his opinion is more likely
to be IBM’s future OLAP direction.

Posted in Oracle OLAP |