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February 12, 2008

First Open Source Business Intelligence Conference... in France ;-)

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

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 12:01 PM | | Comments (0)

January 16, 2008

Sun is acquiring MySQL for $ 1 billion

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.

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 9:14 AM | | Comments (0)

December 25, 2007

2007: I already miss you!

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…

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 11:39 PM | | Comments (0)

October 13, 2007

IBM Information On Demand 2007: What a huge conference!

I just registered this morning for the IBM Information On Demand 2007 conference in Madalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas. It will be a huge conference for the little French guy I am! As I know you love figures here are some: conference bag is around 4 lbs with all documentation inside; conference directory is a book of 240 pages; technology is almost everywhere including in the conference badge with a RFID tag; Donna Summer (yes, the real one) will perform on Tuesday; more than 700 conference sessions… It will certainly be a busy week.

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 11:53 AM | | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

Thanks Larry for this quick answer...

Following my note dated October, 8th regarding Larry’s reaction to SAP’s offer on Business Objects… we had the answer today with this unsolicited offer on BEA for more than $6 billion. Direct consequence: financial analysts imagine that this announcement is a confirmation that Oracle will not come over SAP with a better offer on Business Objects deal. Anyway if Oracle really wants to acquire some BI vendors we have some names to suggest…

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 4:14 PM | | Comments (1)

October 8, 2007

SAP acquired Business Objects: what is in your mind Larry?

I would like to be Mickey Mouse in Larry Ellison’s house when yesterday afternoon he heard about the announcement of SAP regarding the 4.8 billion Euro they put on the table to acquire Business Objects.
We are all actually waiting for a reaction. It could be:
- No way! I don’t want this deal to be closed! I put 10 billion on the table!
- No problem! I will buy another BI vendor! Call me Cognos CEO!
- OK Henning! You want to play that game! I will buy you next month!

More seriously, this acquisition is a sign. A sign of a new consolidation step in Business Intelligence market. A sign of a new race! If you are a BI vendor you should very quickly find an exit for your company. In a couple of years they will be only one place or two for an independent BI vendor. All the other majors will be acquired by Enterprise Framework Vendors (EFV – a new acronym I just invented…). Targets will be Cognos, Information Builders, Microstrategy, perhaps Teradata… and smaller like QlickTech. Big players will be IBM, HP, Oracle and a couple of others.
Two many BI vendors for a small number of EFV… Be the first to join or run after the train…

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 3:42 PM | | Comments (0)

Teradata and SAS enter in a new strong partnership

With Jim Goodnight, founder and President of SAS as an unattended keynote speaker during the first plenary session of Teradata Partners 2007 in Las Vegas, Mike Koehler, President of the new independent Teradata company announced a strategic partnership with SAS.
It was this morning the first opening session of a Partners Teradata conference since the separation of the company with NCR and the listing on Nyse last Monday. More than 3700 people were attending in the conference center of Madalay Bay in Las Vegas.
A couple of hours after the official announcement of acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, all partnership and agreements will certainly be analyzed in details…

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 11:56 AM | | Comments (0)

September 17, 2007

Desperate Genio customers can find a migration solution with Talend

Without long term perspective since the acquisition of Hummingbird by Open Text, around 600 worldwide Genio customers becomes a target for Talend and its open source ETL.

Talend is an open source vendor of the same named ETL tool. It announced this week a migration package specially designed for Genio customers, an ETL from Leonard’s Logic acquired by Hummingbird, itself acquired by Open Text.
« For companies using obsolete tools like Genio, a migration project to a new ETL can be risky and should mean a redevelopment of all their integration architecture », explain Yves de Montcheuil, Marketing Director at Talend. « It is never easy to switch from an ETL to another; you should often take all processes one after the other and recode it ».
The customer’s IT service can face a collective memory problem if all processes, developed sometimes many years before, are not or poor documented.
Talend propose a package of a specially developed migration tool and expertise based on Talend knowledge of ETL tools.
The first step is an audit, of around three days, to analyze Genio repository, collect information about processes and evaluate labor cost to migrate all of them.
Then the migration itself, using the tool developed by Talend and of course their ETL. This tool can drill down into Genio repository to collect metadata and automatically migrate them to the Talend repository.
Usage of Talend ETL is of course needed but the customer can choose any available version including the open source one.
Three main Genio’s customers are actually migrating but prefer their name not to be revealed before they can really avoid Genio from their IT system.
According to Talend this process can save between 50 and 70 % of migration cost of for traditional ETL migration project. Based on this success Talend is evaluating the development of new migration tools from Sunopsis (Oracle) and DataStage (IBM).

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 12:02 PM | | Comments (0)

September 16, 2007

Business Objects search to be acquired

According to a French daily newspaper published on Saturday, Le Figaro, Business Objects mandated Goldman Sachs bank to search for potential candidates to an acquisition of the number one BI vendor.
The newspaper, without revealing sources, write that five candidates have been approached and that one of them could enter in an exclusive negotiation phase during a couple of weeks. In this list of five, SAP could be on the top of the podium but IBM could be interested. Even if nothing is said about the three others, nobody imagine that companies like Oracle or Microsoft could not look at the figures.
Regarding a market capitalization of around 3 billion dollars this deal is reserved to a short list of large international software vendors.
Last week, Business Objects have announced its new suite EPM XI, compilation of its last acquisitions (Cartesis, ALG Software, SRC…) to create a first global suite of products designed for Business Performance Management in large organizations. A new product viewed a major by financial analyst Oddo which see Business Objects as a main leader in BPM due to the organic growth of this market and a lowest competition following multiple acquisitions last months in this market.

Posted by Philippe Nieuwbourg at 12:05 PM | | Comments (0)