Although I have never thought of Oracle or SAP providing true Analtytical capability, so I would say this gives IBM a one up.

Although Although, Oracle brought Thinking Machines ages ago which had a credible Data Mining capability/tool but then swallowed them up and delivered nothing that customers really used (well not in NZ anyway)

So will IBM leverage SPSS to provide a compelling message or lose it in its already massive product stack?

Also SAP/BO and SPSS were already partnering and playing nicely, so is this a first foray into the rumoured IBM buyout of SAP?

And as always where does this leave SAS, HP and Teradata?

So many questions and only time well tell I suppose.

But one thing that is a fact is the big boys are getting bigger, and there are fewer companies out on their own.

I am trying to remember the days of Mainframe Accounting Systems (McCormack & Dodge, CA Mastermind etc) and see if there is a parallel, but that was more death by new entrant (SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle Apps etc)

So can you remember a time where massive vendor consolidation happened and the companies left out survived, let me know if you can.

Ps, I am undecided if I will add Sybase to my SAS/HP/Teradata mix as I cant see how they can survive in the BI market (Sybase IQ etc) but then they still have a credible Relational Database.

Interesting post about the Microstratgy conference over at Cindi Howson’s BIScorecard blog

What took my interest was these comments:

“Another interesting take away from the conference in aftermath of recent consolidation was MicroStrategy’s dance partners. CTOs from Informatica (the market leader in ETL) and Teradata (a market leading database for data warehousing), and MicroStrategy united to discuss pervasive BI. These BI/datawarehouse independents all have a commonality in that they:

• focus exclusively on only a portion of the BI market
• don’t compete with one another
• greatly complement each other”

Convergence in the past has tended to a two company dance (although Oracle often waits for one vendor to swallow a few others before swallowing them – aka JD Edwards and Peoplesoft).

So whats the chance that companies like Teradata, Informatica, Microstrategy would agree to merge all at once, and if they did that would they need SAS to round out the offering? I don’t think they would, SAS just has to many competing products for each to them, but adding SPSS to their mix would make sense.

So that would create the following powerhouses:

1. IBM

2. Oracle

3. Microsoft

4. SAP

5. The Consortium

and that would leave SAS really out on a limb, making the HP/SAS merger far more likely.

(it would also provide an interesting grouping of vendores depending on how you look at their product offering, but I will post about that later)

Time will tell.