By Simon Quicke
4 September 2008
The wave of consolidation in the business intelligence market
is expected to continue as vendors vie with each other to be in a position to
offer the broadest portfolio of services.
According to Datamonitor’s Business Intelligence: Consolidation and Beyond report the competitive pressures that led to Cognos being
picked up by IBM, Business Objects by SAP and several players by Oracle, are
still a major feature of the market.
Earlier this week Oracle made its seventh acquisition of the
year picking up ClearApp, which is designed to strengthen its position in the
service orientated architecture space.
Surya Mukherjee, senior BI analyst with Datamonitor’s
technology team and the report’s author, said that the leading vendors in the
market had realised they were no longer competing in a narrow space and their
competition had widened.
“Software conglomerates are fast integrating the value chain
by acquiring capabilities across the spectrum of BI offerings and delivering
them at lower prices. On the other hand, smaller vendors are desperately trying
to stay relevant to their end-users,” he said.
Mukherjee added that as the value chain had become converged
the vendors were going to introduce a series of innovations to try and make
them more attractive to users including cutting prices and putting software
bundles together.
