Clickstream

Who's Going to Buy Whom Next Year

It's the time of year when everyone starts talking about what's going to happen in the market next year. While hanging out after the sessions in Amsterdam, we all got to talking about this. Most agree that nobody is going to buy Microstrategy, IBI or Ab Initio any time soon. Some talk about the BI players who are left, mainly Actuate.

I've been wondering what HP is up to. They bought Knightsbridge and introduced the Neoview, but they haven't got anything else going on. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP all have data and application integration software. HP doesn't. Would have made more sense for them to buy BEA than for Oracle to. Oracle's buying strategy hasn't made much sense lately. It's like they want to be the ark of software and sell two of everything.

Everyone wonders how long Informatica, Actuate and Teradata will stay standalone, even though TD just separated from NCR.

It looks like all the main BI vendors are going to become application/technology stack elements. The bet is that a couple years from now BOBJ will be for SAP customers, Hyperion/Siebel/etc. will be for Oracle apps (Fusion) customers, Microsoft for Dynamics users, and Cognos for people who are playing the enterprise Java stack. The enterprise stacks (.NET, Java, SAP) are so complicated it's almost impossible not to shove BI functionality into them.

Labels: acquisition, BI, business intelligence

Posted by Mark Tuesday, November 20, 2007 2:22:00 AM | permalink |