BI - Is it over that it is Over?

After a week of market gyrations about SAP and Business Objects, not to mention the "he said, he said" Oracle and BEA activity of Friday and into the weekend, you have to wonder if maybe the real news here is that BI is done a category. A little more on that and a couple observations.

I find it somewhat surprising that both Business Objects and SAP have gotten such crappy market response to their announcement of the take over. When you are the smaller guy and get offered the premium that BOBJ got offered by a market leader, you call it a day. And when you need what they got - good BI, great customer base, market share, maintenance revenue, scale - you pay to keep up with Redwood shores. SAP is getting a good company, filling in the gaps in technology (SAP BI was not exactly driving huge growth) and solidify your position to fight another day. You can actually make a pretty strong argument that this is actually a classic SAP tuck in acquisition, just a lot more expensive compared to how they have executed their strategy in the past. Also with some performance management overlap that was already supposed to have been tucked in.

A couple of SAP moves are also smart - stand alone company, send BOBJ a senior executive, etc. However, the "there is no overlap" and "give us time, we don't have all the details worked out", from team SAP clearly does not inspire confidence. You have to believe if Shai Agassi was still running the point, the spin control would have been handled better and you would not have seen the sheer amount of negative stories and stock movement you saw last week. Once again for those scoring at home, it turns out marketing is important in technology.

Maybe the bigger observation, not yet reported, is that this move officially signals the end of BI. The simple postgame here is that Cognos takes great pain to position themselves as the corporate performance management company, SAS institute is all analytics all the time, and Microstrategy is less a company than an ongoing hobby for their CEO. In simple English, when Intelligent Enterprise quotes Howard Dresner, the alleged "father of BI", (now an independent consultant after having been issued his walking papers after Oracle consumed Hyperion) to comment on the transaction, and Pentaho manages to position a point release of their product as making them an enterprise BI player, you have to ask yourself, is this a real category anymore? If someone can actually show me evidence of a true innovation in this category for awhile, I am all ears. (BTW - new delivery channel via SaaS, Microsoft paying more attention, or giving BI away via open source do not qualify). Color me concerned and more than a little skeptical.

Also of interest is Oracle playing with the BEA bunny and BEA swatting back and saying no thanks. Goldman Sachs is running a "process" for BEA to sell to someone other than Oracle - or least to try to find more money. This is both very expensive and ensures that BEA will not close any big deals for anywhere near what they were quoted on the street last week. Also notable that Oracle says they are not buying BEA for their process management capability. This is the former Fuego acquisition that has now been dressed up as Aqualogic BPM. Oracle seems to be willing to spend a lot of $$ on a strong application server and a bunch of other Aqua stuff that nobody buys, so BEA gives it away because it hangs off the application server. Seems expensive, and a nice premium to BEA shareholders, but the market will make its own judgments.