What interested me was not the standard “we are not for sale” line from Dr Goodnight, or the fact that lots of the large vendors have tried to engage in purchase discussion, but the comments at the end.

Probably a case of sour grapes from ex-employees, but then again…

From my point of view he is right that anybody that purchased SAS would slash and burn staff, and unlike people like Larry Ellison, Dr Goodnight has always seemed (in the media at least) comfortable with a being a wealthy man, but no desire to be the wealthiest, so I can’t see him deciding to sell anytime soon.

On the flip side he is no longer a spring chicken and SAS will encounter much stronger competition from the Microsoft/Oracle/IBM juggernaut’s in the future so maybe he will eventually lose the ability to choose one way or the other.

There was always a view that the migraton of the International business into Carey was a move to make the business more streamlined and saleable. Perhaps it was just a way to make it more agile.

As I have posted before I still think a merge with somebody like HP is inevitable in the long term.

The comments to that article reminded me of a something I was told by a long term SAS employee a few years ago. Apparently if you were a Senior person in Carey you dreaded getting a phonecall from Dr Goodnight asking you to “meet him at the airport”. As the story goes it was advisable to take the cab fare for your trip home with you, as you would no longer be able to expense it after meeting him.

If the story is true then at least he is able to make the hard decisions when required….

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.