This one by Cindi outlines a change in pricing for Business Objects. It also mentions that SAP/BO have made Dev/Test environments free, a subject close to my heart at various SAS customers at the moment (and not in a good way).

And Microstrategy have announced a free version of their reporting suite for upto 100 named users (limited to 1 CPU though). There seems to be lots of additional modules you have to pay for, which I would call core reporting capabilty, but then given the number of blog posts about their offering you have to give their Marketing team a HI 5.

One of the interesting posts was titled “IAP: Business Objects, an SAP company, but why SAP?” (right near the bottom), which mentions that Business Objects has an OEM agreement with SAS to provide analytics capability. I believe that is a typo and BO have actually partnered with SPSS.

The interesting thing is whether this is a first move before SAP purchases SPSS. It would certainly round out their BI stable and make them a credible end-to-end player.

Will be an interesting partnership to watch.

(0r was this an intentional typo and SAP is actually going to buy SAS? That would reduce a lot of mistakes in company recognition given the similarity in names

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.