Business intelligence becomes the jewel in SOA's crown

High-tech vendor consolidations often take place in waves. Sometimes, consolidations are just a matter of too much restless capital searching for the next big score, regardless of whether there's a sound business rationale. Other times, however, a sudden storm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) signals the coming of a new industry order, with far-reaching consequences for business users everywhere.

That is the case with the rash of headline-grabbing M&A deals in the business intelligence (BI) arena over the past year. In rapid succession, we've seen Oracle acquire Hyperion, SAP snatch up Business Objects, and IBM take over Cognos — not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms

It's far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same M&A-stoked empire-building that we've come to expect from large IT solution vendors. Indeed, whenever the likes of Oracle, IBM or Microsoft makes a splashy acquisition, it causes a collective Pavlovian response in vendors, investment bankers, regulators and analysts everywhere. The entire IT world is primed for further consolidations, hence further business opportunities to seize, or competitive threats to defend against — or simply to comment on for any concerned customer or deadline-frantic reporter.

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High-tech vendor consolidations often take place in waves. Sometimes, consolidations are just a matter of too much restless capital searching for the next big score, regardless of whether there's a sound business rationale. Other times, however, a sudden storm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) signals the coming of a new industry order, with far-reaching consequences for business users everywhere.

That is the case with the rash of headline-grabbing M&A deals in the business intelligence (BI) arena over the past year. In rapid succession, we've seen Oracle acquire Hyperion, SAP snatch up Business Objects, and IBM take over Cognos — not to mention acquisitions of smaller BI and corporate performance management (CPM) application vendors by most of those firms

It's far too easy to misinterpret these recent events as just more of the same M&A-stoked empire-building that we've come to expect from large IT solution vendors. Indeed, whenever the likes of Oracle, IBM or Microsoft makes a splashy acquisition, it causes a collective Pavlovian response in vendors, investment bankers, regulators and analysts everywhere. The entire IT world is primed for further consolidations, hence further business opportunities to seize, or competitive threats to defend against — or simply to comment on for any concerned customer or deadline-frantic reporter.

Much of the recent industry commentary has revolved around a theme that doesn't stand up to close scrutiny — the so-called “demise of the BI pure play.” Yes, Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion are (or shall we say, “were”) in the top tier of BI pure plays by market share. But, even with their absorption into big-vendor motherships, they leave behind a long list of BI rivals — including SAS Institute, MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, JasperSoft, and Pentaho — that remain very much independent (though, clearly, any vendor has its price and many no doubt are courting potential suitors).

Just as important, new vendors continue to emerge across all segments of the BI universe — such as reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), dashboarding, predictive analytics, data mining, text analytics, intelligent search and complex event processing (CEP) — with many of the new players differentiating through focus on software as a service, open source, appliances and other nouveau approaches to delivering BI functionality.

What's actually driving this recent M&A activity is growing vendor recognition that BI is the crown jewel in any comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution portfolio. Though Oracle and SAP (and, to a lesser degree, IBM) already had decent BI wares in their respective SOA portfolios, none of them were on any enterprise's short list of name-brand BI solution providers — until, that is, each of them decided to grab a leading BI pure play.

SOA suites cannot be considered feature-complete unless they incorporate a comprehensive range of BI features. Some SOA application and middleware vendors have strong BI offerings in their current solution portfolios. In addition to Oracle, IBM, and SAP, Microsoft has noticeably beefed up its own BI portfolio over the past year, rolling out the new Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 as the strategic CPM centerpiece of a BI stack that includes SQL Server (Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Integration Services), SharePoint Server (a portal with which many third-party BI/CPM tool integrate out of the box) and the Office application suite (of which one component, Microsoft Excel, is a de facto standard client interface supported by most third-party BI/CPM vendors).