IBM To Stop Reselling Essbase

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.