Yes, it means something that Oracle is buying Hyperion. Hyperion is, however, integrated only with ESRI, while the other largest business intelligence (BI) vendors also integrate with others (Autodesk, Bentley, GE Energy, Google Maps, and MapInfo). Hyperion provides retail and public sector geospatial intelligence (GI) capabilities through a partnership with Australia-based Integeo, a Forge Group company. Integeo Map Intelligence links Hyperion’s BI dashboard with GI solutions.

But Oracle bought Hyperion for other reasons, especially its performance management solutions and presence in enterprise financial departments. And to poke at SAP, of course.

Oracle clearly understands the importance and value of spatial data to its clients as demonstrated by its product offerings and spatial data support. It believes, and The Geo Factor agrees, that to fully address enterprise requirements, spatial data needs to be integrated with other data and applications.

If Oracle can pull together Hyperion financial applications with Oracle and partner spatial applications, enterprises should benefit. The best chance for enterprises to widely adopt geospatial or location intelligence applications is through BI, which is already widely used. The potential downside of independent BI providers being acquired is less motivation for developing integration with multiple geospatial products. This might benefit only the largest of the GIS vendors and their customers, at the expense of the smaller providers. More likely, though, is wider acceptance of geospatial information and applications as businesses see benefits through the enterprise applications.