HyperRoll Sues Hyperion

QuickTake

HyperRoll, a vendor of data aggregation software, announced it had filed a suit against Hyperion Software, alleging that Hyperion had infringed upon patents held by HyperRoll. HyperRoll has until recently provided their aggregation software to organizations that use Hyperion Essbase and are faced with burdensome OLAP cube generation times. HyperRoll's software dramatically minimized cube load times through the recently introduced Hyperion Essbase 7X and also improves cube loading times for previous Essbase versions. This suit adds risk to future plans of potential Essbase 7X, licensees but the degree of risk is yet to be determined. Hyperion has publicly denied patent infringement and intends to vigorously defend itself. Patent lawsuits are a costly and time-consuming endeavor and it will be some time before we know the outcome of this lawsuit. Organizations that are in production or planning to deploy Hyperion 7X should continue with their existing deployments but get clarification of the lawsuit’s risk through a contract review with legal counsel and Hyperion. Organizations examining purchases of Hyperion 7X should do similar but include these potential risk factors in their license pre-purchase assessments.