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BI-BPM Vendor Consolidation – It’s a bazaar out there!

Oracle buying Hyperion, SAP buying OutlookSoft and Business Objects, Cognos buying Applix - and these are only the major transactions! So what are these moves all about? Are they about building solution competency or to fill the offerings gap? Or are they pruning the market-place of smaller players?

Looks like it may be all of the above, but it does seem like there is a feeding frenzy that will muddy up the waters for a while and confuse the customers further. Some customers may even decide to hold investment decisions. Although the pace of buy-outs has gone up, there still are many players remaining in this market – but are they worth decimating, especially from the perspective of Oracle, SAP or Microsoft. Even if there are some more buy-outs in the short-term, in the medium term there will be a breather as the buying companies spend time to integrate the bought companies and building a streamlined offering that can be ‘plugged and played’ by customers.

The IT Products vendor environment is becoming like a mall. Just like malls have four or five anchor stores and then there are smaller vendors strewn all around, some with niche offerings and some with similar offerings with differentiated pricing or differentiated convenience offerings. You can either go to one store and get pretty-much everything that you may need or you can buy ‘best of breed’ and hope that the whole outfit comes out right. In our world, the eventual IT anchor vendors could be Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and the wild-card IBM. With the increasing consolidation and polarization of vendors, the Customer-Vendor alignment will become more critical for companies.

So what are your options?

Click here to read more on how the market may develop and the potential impact on your shop.