Oracle snaps up Hyperion for $3.3bn

Oracle announced on Thursday that it has agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions for $3.3bn, in a move to expand in the area of performance management systems.

The acquisition is yet another multibillion-dollar deal in recent years for Oracle, which has shown a hunger for expanding quickly via mergers. The software maker acquired customer relationship management software maker Siebel Systems for $5.85bn last year and archrival PeopleSoft for $10.3bn in 2005.

While the PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions had product overlap to varying degrees with Oracle's existing business, the Hyperion deal is expected to have little redundancy, Oracle executives said in a conference call with analysts.

Hyperion sells business intelligence tools and financial applications to corporations. The company's software is used to analyse business data, such as sales history, and for financial planning and budgeting.

It also provides "dashboards" or applications for that visually represent how a company is performing on a set of measurements, such as improving customer response time or meeting a sales objective.

Oracle plans to team up Hyperion's EPM software with its own Business Intelligence tools and analytic applications, creating an expanded performance management system that includes planning, budgeting, consolidation, operational analytics and compliance reporting.

Oracle is also using the Hyperion acquisition to take aim at rival SAP, a leading maker of software for enterprise resource management.

Dawn Kawamoto and Martin LaMonica write for CNET News.com.