Is performance management becoming a platform play vs. a feature/function play?

Interesting feedback from an industry analyst recently on the trends around the performance management market. He said that with the Oracle/Hyperion acquisition announced, that the market is approaching a tipping point where the choice for the business buyer will increasingly be tied in with the platform, vs. the system with the best features.

Now this might not be a surprise to many folks, particularly on the IT side of the house, since IT standardization has been Gospel for quite some time, and the pesky business user who dares to purchase or fund a project “off standard” quickly finds their help desk requests routed through Outer Mongolia.

But this is a new trend for people like the CFO and executives who have previously had the power to “dictate” to IT what the standard for the finance department would be. With the continuing push of ERP and BI vendors to “standardize” across their platform, might the choice for business users be narrowing to those products that are part of the IT standard?

And what does this mean for the best of breed vendors out there who are not tied to a platform—will they be confined to the mid-market where there is no de facto standard or the standards are not yet enforced? Interesting times…