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Sun partners with Hyperion for business process management on Solaris

• By John K. Waters
• September 7, 2004

Sun is partnering with business intelligence vendor Hyperion to develop and market business performance management solutions running on Sun's Solaris OS. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun and its Sunnyvale, Calif.-based neighbor made the announcement recently.

The two vendors announced their agreement this past week. Under the terms of the agreement, Sun and Hyperion will market and co-sell integrated solutions across the financial, telecommunications and retail industries, and lines of businesses such as sales, marketing and human resources.

"The amount of data stored in data warehouses is doubling in size every 12 to 18 months," Michael McNerney, Sun's director of business applications and market development tells eADT. "But what makes that statistic so important in the enterprise is the tremendous growth in the number of users, which probably doubles every 12 months. More and more people need access to data about how their part of the business is running. We're working with Hyperion to bring together the underlying platform from Sun with their application logic to build out an enterprise-grade business intelligence infrastructure that meets the increasing performance demands specific to [the] BI and data warehousing marketplace."

For Sun, the partnership brings Hyperion's Business Performance Management Suite, including a number of applications and its BI platform, to the Solaris platform on Opteron and SPARC processor-based systems, and spanning the Java Enterprise System and the Java Desktop System. The agreement also looks to further Hyperion's push into business performance management, which the company sees as a higher-level construct enabled by BI technology.

"Business process management has a broader footprint," Srikant Gokulnatha, Hyperion's director of product marketing and strategy, tells eADT. It combines BI tools, transactional data and financial management capabilities to provide business with the ability to adjust their operations to meet corporate and financial goals, he explains.

"Our customers rely on our applications - especially our financial application - to do things such as compliance [with the Sarbanes-Oxley act in the U.S. and International Financial Reporting Standards in Europe] and to monitor the financial operation," Gokulnatha says. "The systems that Sun provides meet exactly that need. It's very logical that we deepen our relationship with Sun. We have very complementary messages from both the hardware and software perspectives."

"Business intelligence and business performance management applications are transforming from departmental applications to enterprise-wide, mission-critical apps," he adds. "Consequently, [this type of integration] is a natural step as the BI and business performance management market becomes more mature and customers begin to have more refined expectations from vendors."