Blog: William McKnight

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Business Objects buys Firstlogic

As announced yesterday, Business Objects has entered into a purchase agreement for data quality solutions provider Firstlogic for $69 million - all cash.

That Firstlogic would be bought soon is not surprising since they had recently announced, though not consumated, intent to be purchased by Pitney-Bowes. Surely they will thrive more within business intelligence with Business Objects as their suitor. The move is not surprising on another front, and that is the overall consolidation trend of the business intelligence industry.

What is does signal is that the "big 3" of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are not doing all of the purchasing and that even BI-centric players like Business Objects (and Informatica with their recent purchase of Similarity Systems) are still growing their businesses through acquisition. Although other BI acquistions are probably not complete for 2006 (Informatica? Microstrategy?), this recent trend will keep a thriving, competitive (and non-standardized) BI market in place for years to come.

As well, data quality is becoming so true a component of business intelligence, that it is well regarded as a member of the standard stack alongside ETL, DBMS and data access.

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