Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Consolidation - New Innovation Cycles

Consolidation is the buzzword in the industry this year. We have seen vendors merging or being acquired etc. You all would have read and heard about this topic in the past few months. In this blog I share my thoughts on the consolidation and where I believe this is leading all of us to.

In the BI industry we have seen the consolidation of two leaders Business Objects and Cognos into SAP and IBM. Whenever there is consolidation and mergers happening there is speculation on how it will change your landscape and what the future holds.

Although there are promises from both SAP and IBM about their acquired technologies, it does leave the end users a little perplexed. For example if you are running your database on Oracle, with DataStage as your ETL tool and Business Objects as your BI tool, your procurement team now deals with three big vendors and will probably have to look at pricing and legal when time is due. Apart from this compliance and integration between vendors becomes your headache. As we look at all these issues, the end user might feel a little left out in the cold.

But on the brighter side of things these acquisitions are what will lead to a next wave of technology innovations. Maybe we will see more adoption to Open Source. Whatever the case, the user community will be rewarded with more choices and options in the future. We might even actually see the adoption of SOA technologies into BI solutions and have the entire reporting and analytical solutions as services.

Another potential option in the waiting is integration of Data Warehouse Appliances and BI solutions as bundled low cost options. Cognos was on-course for this with their Celequest acquisition, which may be another offering from IBM in the future.

As we look at all these different options that will be coming around, it does make sense to think that this cycle of consolidations is required to bring out a new cycle of innovations.

As a parting shot we do have a few lone rangers in the original BI players like Informatica, MicroStrategy, Information Builders and Teradata. We will all be anxiously watching on what the future holds for these innovations in the coming months ahead./

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