News
Analyst: XML Spec a Coup for Hyperion
- By Scott Bekker
- 04/26/2001
Hyperion Solutions Corp. scored a coup this week by allying with Microsoft Corp. on an XML for Analysis specification for online analytic processing (OLAP) and data mining, according to one industry analyst.
The announcement during Hyperion's annual conference means Hyperion will serve as a bridge between Microsoft technologies and the JOLAP initiative led by Oracle, IBM, Sun and Hyperion, says Mike Schiff, vice president of E-Business and Business Intelligence at consultancy Current Analysis.
The agreement has an upside for Microsoft as well.
"Microsoft gets credibility out of it because Oracle can't really sit down and say this is an XML-only offering," Schiff says.
Hyperion holds the largest market share among OLAP server providers, according to research from the U.K.-based OLAP Report.
Microsoft went on record last year to trash the JOLAP initiative, which is an OLAP version of the JDBC API. In a statement at the time, Microsoft derided the JOLAP group for being three years behind Microsoft's OLE DB initiative.
Neither of the standards is really out in the field yet, Schiff says.
XML for Analysis uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to define the data access interaction between a client application and an analytical data provider. –
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.