First, Oracle acquires Hyperion. Next, SAP announces an acquisition of Business Objects. Today, IBM announced it will acquire Cognos. It looks like the only major independent BI player is MicroStrategy.

This acquisition provides a lot of food for thought. With the combination of Ascential and Cognos, IBM will have a complete technology solution from data acquisition, cleansing, all the way through data access. Additionally, these technologies are best-of-breed technologies brought together in one umbrella.

Technology Play
Although this is a good technology play, I'm still of the belief that the days of building your own BI solution from soup to nuts is not the way the market is going. This is a good strategy under yesterday's model. It's my belief that Oracle and SAP have the right long-term strategy, which is to provide analytic applications using their own technologies. Companies don't want to build expensive data warehouses and their own analytic applications if they can buy one that somebody else has developed. Also, by bringing together analytics with their business processes, organizations can achieve benefits that can't be achieved with a BI framework that is silo-ed off from their transaction systems.

Why not Analytic Applications?
Back in 2002, IBM had the opportunity to get in the applications business. We at PeopleSoft were hoping that IBM would be our white knight and save us from Oracle. There was quite a bit of effort going into discussions in this area, but in the end IBM didn't want to get into the applications space. They wanted to stay a technology/consuulting organization. Now, that opportunity is pretty much gone unless some sort of mega-merger occurs between IBM and SAP or Oracle (which I can't see happening). So, it will be very interesting seeing which strategy works better. My money is on Oracle/SAP with Cognos becoming less relevant, but this assumes that Oracle and SAP are successful in integrating their new BI acquisitions (Oracle seems to be doing a pretty good job, at least from a PeopleSoft perspective).

Labels: 2007, Business, Cognos, Reporting