"You cant afford to have any bias to other applications that might exist in an infrastructure," said Loubser.

Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing at Cartesis, a financial consolidation vendor, said that in the foreseeable future, there will be a lack of clarity on applications from Oracle and where they sit on the application roadmap. "It opens up a lot of opportunities," he said.

Craig Schiff, president of BPM partners, a vendor-neutral consulting firm that helps companies launch BPM initiatives, says the acquisition will be a significant challenge for Oracle.

"No transactional vendor has been able to sell PM applications. Nobody buys SAPs PM apps," Schiff said.

'The only value Oracle may offer to its customers is integration with its underlying data structure. But Schiff says Hyperion itself is still struggling with integration issues between its own applications, such as financial management, planning, and BI tools.