Microsoft and Hyperion Collaborate on Business Intelligence Solutions
The most interesting part of the announcement is
Specifically, Hyperion customers will be able to use SQL Server Reporting Services to access Hyperion System 9 BI+ Essbase Analytics, and also will be able to display Microsoft reports in the Hyperion System 9 Workspace environment. In addition, Microsoft customers will be able to access SQL Server Analysis Services data using Hyperion System 9 BI+. Also, Hyperion System 9 will leverage SQL Server Integration Services for data access.
So, I guess, soon I will add Hyperion System 9 BI+ to the list of clients for Analysis Services at
http://www.mosha.com/msolap/util.htm. Microsoft and Hyperion while are competitors in the OLAP Servers market, have experience of working together. In 2001 Hyperion joined Microsoft in support for XMLA standard. As a Microsoft representative in XMLA council, I worked closely with Hyperion team, and it was very healthy and productive cooperation - together we finished XMLA 1.0 and built XMLA 1.1 standards. And I beleive it is that work that we invested into writing the standard, developing its implementations and doing vendor interop etc, that ultimately enabled this announcement. I am really happy about this development, as I beleive that such cooperation, especially on the standards, benefit everybody. And the customers, both ours and Hyperion's, will have more choice and more interop.
P.S. It is symbolic in a sense. I still have my "Wired for OLAP" t-shirt from 1997 which I got when AppSource announced support for OLAP Services 7.0. Of course, it was later bought by Arbor, which merged with Hyperion, and support for OLAP Services/Analysis Services was discontinued then. Glad too see it coming back after 9 years :)