More on Consolidation - Business Objects and Cognos together?

Interesting comment and prognostication from Rob Preston at Information Week regarding consolidation. While Cognos being consumed by IBM is notable for the size and last tier one vendor to leave, Rob believes there are many more to come, some sooner rather than later as the tier one players - IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft - as well as the tier two players in software - HP, Symantec and CA continue grow. Among the interesting suggestions here:

- SAP would be a great acquisition for IBM. Among the reasons cited was the marriage of applications from SAP to IBM global services. Not mentioned is the perspective $5B+ overlap of BI and EPM applications. Not out of the realm of the possible.

- A mention that Oracle may be running out of big companies to buy, but buying a big services company is unlikely according to Jason Mayward from Credit Suisse Worldwide because "Oracle isn't interested in the relationship business." He said it, I didn't.

- MSFT could still be interested in Yahoo.

- A Joint venture between Salesforce.com and Workday, the SaaS ERP company built by the same great people who brought you PeopleSoft.

I suspect the consolidations will continue and the big will get bigger. What will be interesting is to see the next class of companies who deliver new value and innovation in the shadow of the larger players.