As usual French people are showing the trends ;-)

For the first time in Europe and perhaps in the world, a real conference day focusing on Open Source Business Intelligence will be hosted in Paris on March 18th.
Hosted beside the French Computer Museum in Paris business district of La Defense, this conference is very close to the «traditional proprietary conferences». I mean: it's free to attend. And despite to Steve Ballmer's statement «Free software means no free soda» free coffee and free lunch will be provided!

How is this possible? Just because Open Source companies everyday looks more and more like traditional companies with marketing and sponsorship budgets. And for this first ever main conference about OSBI all main vendors have decided to sponsor: SpagoBI, Ingres, Jaspersoft, MySQL, Talend, Pentaho... and tomorrow others.

If you are in Paris in March and if you don't agree with the much closed vision of Gartner about Open Source Business Intelligence just join us! Of course you need to learn French before ;-)

Registration is available on: http://www.amiando.com/forumbiopensource

After a year of consolidation and the birth of four main leaders in BI market (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) Gartner see a new birth of young and innovative companies. Here is the list of companies you should follow in 2008 with links to their web sites:
FractalEdge: www.fractaledge.com
PivotLink: www.pivotlink.com
Oco: www.oco-inc.com
1010Data: www.1010data.com
Endeca: www.endeca.com
Advizor Solutions: www.advizorsolutions.com
Illuminate: www.i-lluminate.com
LucidEra: www.lucidera.com
Panoratio: www.panoratio.com
Greenplum: www.greenplum.com

SAP and IBM announced yesterday a new product codenamed Atlantic. In this world of coopetition Atlantic appears as an answer to Duet, previous software developed between SAP and Microsoft. Both software have the same goal: to create an easy connection between desktop environment and corporate databases to access from the desktop to processes, reporting and analytics. Duet is for Microsoft Exchange and Atlantic will be for Lotus Notes. It's amazing to realize that despite to the large common customer base between SAP and Microsoft, they didn't yet propose a collaboration tool developed together. Perhaps SAP was more "Microsoft oriented" during the last years... And perhaps an increased competition on ERP for small and medium companies between SAP and Microsoft has changed the game... Anyway you can remember that SAP has been founded by people coming from SAP... it was more that a couple of decade ago... It could be enough to re-launch some rumors between SAP and IBM!

Hot day for acquisitions! BEA finally acquired by Oracle and now Sun put $ 1 billion on the table to catch the Swedish company MySQL and its thousands of customers.
What could be the consequences for BI market?
Nothing direct I think. But on a middle term basis we can imagine that this announcement is seen as a signal for a new step in vendors consolidation. MySQL is not really used in BI applications. Large customers don't really trust yet in an open source database to store terabytes of strategic data from their corporate data warehouse. But with the cover of a trusted brand like Sun bringing a partner network, large support organization, and strong local presence in many countries... things could change. And if MySQL is seen as a new competitor in the data wrehousing area, I am sure that other vendors including Pentaho or Talend will revise their strategy and search for their next step.

As a professional writer involved every day in looking for and reviewing news and trends in Business Intelligence market for our French readers, 2007 was a fantastic year. A year of which you can say: things have changed. Even if I am sure that 2008 will bring a lot of news I will certainly remember 2007 and...

January: Teradata and NCR separate into two different companies
March: Oracle acquire Hyperion for USD 3 billions
March: SAP acquire Pilot Software a pioneer of BI
April: Cartesis is acquired by Business Objects
May: SAP acquire Outlooksoft
July: Data Mirror is acquired by IBM
September: Cognos acquire Applix
October: SAP acquire Business Objects
November: Cognos is acquired by IBM

Who is missing? We will certainly hear in 2008 news from HP, Microstrategy, Microsoft, Information Builders, QlikTech...