Google and Hyperion Collaborate on BI

Recently, my Google stock's value jumped. (Gasp! Did I just publicly admit to owning Google stock?) Unquestionably, Hyperion's recently announced support for Google caused the boost. Hyperion, is a longstanding business intelligence (BI) software company that still holds significant share in the OLAP and BI markets. (To read more about Hyperion's announcement, see http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003215.) The software company's support will allow corporate users to access their BI data search-engine style.

Personally, I use only Windows Live Search (http://www.live.com) and Windows Desktop Search these days but am still eager to experience Google's BI approach. Brian Moran mentions Google's relationship with the enterprise data space in "Enterprise-Class Data Management--from Google?" (http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/50149/sql_server_50149.html)and in "Can the Spreadmart Beast Be Tamed?" (http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/50661/sql_server_50661.html). But the collaboration with Hyperion changes things a bit--it adds new integration to Google's approach while offering Hyperion an alternative user interface; we are now witnessing Google aggressively step forward leveraging their infrastructure investments. What intrigues me the most about the collaboration is how close we may be to an English Query platform (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/eqbol/eqintbol_72b3.asp?frame=true) that really works as intended for relational, OLAP, and unstructured data (and isn't limited to just English ). I believe the next major steps for BI are to make it more accessible to the whole organization and to offer intelligence in the user experience process. TARGIT, a Microsoft BI partner, has been doing a great job with an intuitive intelligent user experience process for quite some time (http://www.targit.com/Products/TARGIT_Suite.aspx), but the company's toolset isn't as ubiquitous as a simple Web-based corporate search engine.

I'll also watch how the collaboration with Google might expand Hyperion's data-storage and Web-access abilities. However, I haven't quite gotten my relational/multi-dimensional head around how Google handles data (e.g., Bigtable--http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html). So I can't comment about Google's architecture, whether it's a great architecture for search index data, or if it's truly a solid architecture for all types of organizational information assets as Google claims. I guess we'll have to wait and see which components come from Google and which come from Hyperion.

I'm sure our friends at Microsoft weren't surprised that Hyperion and Google teamed up and aren't far behind with introducing similar capabilities--I look forward to seeing it unfold.