Friday, November 23, 2007

OLAP Vendors Capitulate


I did some research on where the Business Intelligence market was heading and came to the conclusion that there has been complete capitulation in the marketplace. The table to the right shows the market share of the top 10 OLAP vendors in 2006 (courtesy of The OLAP Report).

In 2007 the following events took place. Oracle bought Hyperion. Cognos bought Applix. Business Objects bought Cartesis. SAP announced that it is buying Business Objects. IBM announced that it is buying Cognos.

In essence, the top 10 OLAP vendors which included several important Independent Software Vendors (ISV) is being replaced by the top 4 enterprise software vendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

There are two independent vendors left in the list and neither is going to break out. Microstrategy is in the ROLAP niche, suitable for big gnarly problems that need a lot of money. Microstrategy could make a good fit with the newly independent Teradata another company in a similar niche. Infor is a private company that has been rolling up second tier software vendors in the same way that Computer Associates did in the 80's and 90's. It is the new "home for old software".

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