Vendor Convergence and SAS
There has been a large amount of vendor and product convergence other the last 10 to 15 years.
First we saw the convergence of business applications such as Financials, Procurement CRM and HR by the big boys at the time such as Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP.
Then we saw the convergence of vendors with Oracle and Microsoft both buying a number of business application vendors such as Great Plains, Seibel, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft.
This phenomenon has also occurred in the Business Intelligence space, over the last couple of years as we saw the convergence of Data Warehousing, Data Quality Reporting and of late performance management solutions, again by the big boys such as Oracle, SAP and of course SAS.
In the last 12 months we have seen the business vendor acquisitions being replicated this time in the Business Intelligence space, with Oracle buying Hyperion, Microsoft buying Proclarity, SAP buying Business Objects and lastly IBM buying Cognos.
So where does that leaves SAS?
Well Dr Goodknight is not getting younger, but then again that’s no reason to sell/merge. But if SAS doesn’t ‘merge’ with another global player can they really survive in the constantly consolidating marketplace. If Business Performance Monitoring (BPM) becomes the next big thing can they develop fats enough to keep the big boys at bay and retain their market share?
If SAS was to merge who would it be with? My pick is either HP or Sun. HP have started their entry into the Business Intelligence space with the release of the NeoView data warehousing platform, they have the hardware side covered and the consulting side with their purchase of Knightsbridge. SAS would give them access to all solutions in all the Business Intelligence quadrants in one go.
Sun on the other hand is less likely but they do seem to be making a play to become a leading SAS Partner and if HP buys SAS, would that not relegate Sun to becoming nothing but a hardware vendor for all eternity?
Lots of questions, lets see who answers them and when.
