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Hyperion earnings to disappoint

The analytic application software maker says its third-quarter earnings will fail to meet analyst expectations, though the company still expects to turn a profit.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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Analytic application software maker Hyperion Solutions said yesterday its third-quarter earnings will fail to meet analyst expectations, though the company still expects to turn a profit.

In line with many other enterprise software companies that are reporting a sales slowdown, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said it expects to report lower-than-expected third-quarter revenues of between $100 million and $104 million.

Due to weaker sales and slow-to-close deals, the company said its operating margins and earnings per share would be "significantly lower" than analysts' expectations.

Wall Street analysts had expected the company to report a profit of 22 cents a share compared with 21 cents a share in the year-ago quarter, according to research firm First Call.

"As we cautioned investors in January, merger-related sales productivity issues continued to affect our results during the third quarter and the back-ended nature of the quarter made it difficult for us to forecast results as accurately as we would have liked," chief executive John Dillon said in a statement. Hyperion, which makes software that companies use for reporting, analysis, modeling, and planning, merged with report writing toolmaker and online analytical processing (OLAP) software maker Arbor Software last May.

Meanwhile, Columbus, Ohio-based Symix Systems also warned that its third-quarter results would fall short of Wall Street's expectations, blaming the shortfall on delayed customer orders because of spending on Year 2000 computer projects.

For the third quarter ended March 31, Symix expects to earn in the range of 9 to 11 cents a share, compared with analysts' consensus estimate of 13 cents a share, according to First Call.

In the year-earlier quarter, Symix, an enterprise software provider to midsize manufacturing companies, earned 9 cents a share. In the current quarter, revenues are expected to increase 22 to 26 percent from year-ago revenue of $24.3 million.

Services revenue is expected to jump 50 percent, while core software business sales could be flat compared with results from last year, the company said.

Final results will be announced April 20.

Reuters contributed to this report.