Hyperion Solutions acquires UpStream Software

In an acquisition greeted positively by analysts and users, Hyperion Solutions announced it is acquiring privately-held Upstream Software.

UpStream’s product, called WebLink DM, provides “a data readiness and guided workflow application that is used to track the movement of financial information from source to report.” (Quote from   Hyperion’s press release of April 20, 2006

What does that mean? Sometimes concepts do not lend themselves to easy classification and may be difficult to get the market’s attention. The product enables data integration and data quality processes to move data between applications and to track any flow and changes to the data. 

So far, it sounds like Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool. This is where it gets more complex. ETL is a general capability that is offered in many tools, but what we have here is more of an application that manages the data integration workflow and data quality processes. It works with financial data (current application not a design limitation) including Hyperion’s financial and business performance management (BPM) applications. So it tracks and manages data movement from the data sources to reporting. This sounds like just what the market is demanding in financial transparency and the government with Sarbanes-Oxley.

This product illustrates that data quality is much more than cleansing name and address data. The latter is a great capability, but it greatly limits the scope of what data quality is all about. Data quality needs to address the numbers that business people use in monitoring their businesses and making decisions. Data quality is not a one-time conversion or cleansing operation, but involves managing and tracking what happens to the data from creation (data sources) to consumption (reporting and analytics.) Data quality is a process that is ongoing and needs to be measured just as key business indicators (KPIs) are measured by the business. And the financial area, both Hyperion’s and UpStream’s “sweet” spot, is just the corporate function that can provide business justification to build those processes into data integration and data quality.

UpStream was a Hyperion preferred partner since 2002 and its approximately 200 customers are also Hyperion customers. The acquisition appears to look like a “no brainer.” The product that should blend in well with Hyperion and they’ve got a common customer base. Also,  UpStream is pretty small (less than fifty people is what I hear), so the organization and people portion of the acquisition should be relatively easy (as acquisitions go.)

Although much larger acquisitions usually get most of the attention, smaller targeted acquisitions by software companies are a great way to pick-up product and people expertise. And it is a bonus when the acquired company has an installed base of customers.