Information Week Breaks the Seal...

It's interesting how all the BI vendors go to great lengths to adhere to the strict guidelines and protocols established by Gartner and the other analyst firms on what you can say about your own particular rating in the annual magic quadrants races, waves, and vendor evaluations. And it's reflected in the type of bland, non-newsy press releases that vendors tend to issue in these cases, like Cognos here, and Microsoft here (strange that we haven't heard from BOBJASAPCO (Business Objects an SAP Company) yet, they're usually right on the ball with these types of announcements when they're happy with their placement--could it be that they're not? hmmm...

In any case, all that is out the window now as Mary Hayes Weier writes today in Information Week about the Microsoft Surge into the leader's quadrant at the expense of some of the other traditional BI vendors. I'm not sure how taboo or copyrighted any of this information actually is, but it does provide some welcomed insight into the actual report, and lists some of the other vendors and the general area in which they placed in this review cycle.

Overall there's a lot to be happy about in both the Gartner report and this article if you're based up in Redmond today. Expect this article to be forwarded around to A LOT of prospects and customers. What strikes me is the refreshing context that an article like this provides, in contrast to the careful dancing and posturing that all the BI vendors go through in their official announcements. Ultimately I think this helps the customer and the market.

8 Ball Corner Pocket

Have you ever played pool against a really good player and wonder where your turn went? The BI market has seen enough moves in the past 18 months to make Fast Eddie Felson shake his head in disbelief. Oh and no, my “8 ball corner pocket” title wasn’t referring to the end of the Cognos 8 product, or was it? Lame BI jokes aside, the one thing this acquisition does do is put IBM in an interesting position to actually be able to provide the technology and truly implement on it with one of the most complete software to services BI solution sets. Services has long been the abandoned love child of BI vendors in the past, as the technology has matured vendors have traditionally looked to partners for implementation services. Over the past 10 years IBM has built strong practices from data warehousing to performance management partnering heavily with BI software vendors like Business Objects and Cognos.

From a technology perspective I’d strongly agree with Guy’s take on the strengths of the big four, IBM will also have a nice marriage of the Cognos BI functionality and their data management technology; master data management and ETL capabilities they acquired from Ascential, in March of 2005. For this performance guy, it was been a exciting to be in the middle of a market while its consolidating so rapidly. As the balls get re-racked and the new players chalk up their cues, it will certainly be interesting to see the new strategies that unfold and the direction.

“The Five Possible Suitors”

So by now everyone has heard about the now infamous “Le Figaro Leak” from over the weekend, where some enterprising young reporter/disgruntled employee/cash poor intern, whoever—got hold of news that Business Objects has retained Goldman Sachs to help them find a buyer.

Couple of important markers to tell you this has some legs to it—first, multiple emails going out to employees to not discuss the matter externally, or even with each other. The old “loose lips sink ships” mantra is in full force in the halls of San Jose and Paris. Second, however, no statements of outrage, denial, or any sort of righteous indignation came out yesterday, and with the crack PR staff of Hill and Knowlton on speed dial over there, one would think that something would have been said to squash the rumors before they gained legs. So lets assume that there’s some smoke here.

Importantly, this smoke is really not new. For months before Oracle acquired Hyperion, there were rumors that an announcement was imminent—the “safe” room had been set up, documents were being exchanged—it just came down to a price issue. Now whether or not that’s the truth, I have absolutely no idea, but the point is that amongst the employees, they’ve been down this road once already this year.

Marketwatch mentions five possible suitors for the company, and since none of the Performance Guys work at Business Objects at this point in time, and all my options have cleared, let’s look into our EPM Magic 8-ball and see who might be contacted to see if there’s an “expression of interest” on their part…

SAP: “Outlook seems clear.” This is the one “name” that’s out there in terms of who would likely be most interested. Becoming more acquisition-friendly with recent purchases of Pilot and OutlookSoft, but far less of a partner and far more of a competitor to Business Objects in recent years. Also, OutlookSoft acquisition is a direct overlap to BOBJ Cartesis/SRC/ALG acquisitions—so do they take it for the BI side? Two European companies—might be easier to bring together culturally—wait what am I saying—SAP and culture? Sorry about that…

HP: “Intriguing—hadn’t thought of them, wait to shake again.” They have been making noise for some time about getting into the BI space, and with the business humming along all fronts, this would be a bold move in an area in which they have little experience or mind share. However, they have the deep pockets, and as the server and printer businesses continue to mature, the higher-growth apps business may beckon, and this may be an easy, less threatening way to get into the game. Local as well with the San Jose/American side of Business Objects, would afford good integration at the corporate level.

IBM: “Maybe, but not sure this works for them, hold still a minute. Yep, makes sense.” They keep making inroads into the BI space with EIM and ETL acquisitions, but also have deep partnerships with Cognos and others that would be sacrificed to bet everything on Business Objects. Great services opportunity for Big Blue (are we still allowed to call them that?) here, and if they want to make a play against the big apps vendors, this would certainly be that stake in the ground. Culturally, way different than Business Objects, but it would be an easy integration for most of the product line. The key is the services arm—do they want an exclusive with one vendor?

Adobe: “Just how hard are you shaking me?” Just announced stellar earnings, doing more with Business Objects, have a contrary technology to Microsoft around documents and reports, have the #1 product in Acrobat around document sharing—what’s not to like here? The companies are reportedly working on an announcement around business process management, might this be a precursor to something bigger? This is an intriguing combination, one that will require further watching...

Oracle: “Are you insane?—shake again.” As mentioned above, this was the assumption earlier in the year before the Hyperion announcement, and in the words of O.J., “if they did it,” they’d likely be doing it for the BI and EIM business, not the EPM business which is now well served by Hyperion. Boy talk about technology overlaps—but—to keep it out of SAP’s hands, might that be enough of a carrot for the Oracle folks to grab onto?