I have three gut reactions to the news that Cognos is going to be acquired by IBM for 5 Billion.
1. OK it's official and now there is 'nobody' left standing.
'Nobody' meaning Information Builders, Microstrategy, SAS and the open
sourcers. SAS is not going anywhere and was never the same kind of
player as everybody else. Microstrategy is probably not an attractive
target, nor is IBI. They will not be assimilated and will basically die
off, like everybody else.
2. Cognos is going to disappear inside of IBM. It will be absorbed
into the Blob of Websphere and will be IBMized into marketing oblivion.
Very little of Cognos branding will survive once the product
integration is complete. It will find itself barely recognizable
amongst other brilliant IBM technologies like Cube Views etc. The good
news is that if the DB2 engineers get their hands on it, Report Net
will ultimately and finally work as it had been advertised.
3. Microsoft stands alone, again. We (now that I've sold out to the
dark side) have a lot to prove in the enterprise space, but what we
won't have is a huge product integration story to have to sell. That is
actually a big deal in the enterprise space and the FUD works in
Microsoft's favor in the short term. Whether or not MS reps can and
will capitalize on this moment is anybody's guess. Even though I'm on
the MS extended squad, I'm still from Missouri.
Outside of that, I will speculate that this finally represents the
top of the bell curve in an industry that has taken too damned long to
mature. I walk around with my jaw dropped when I think about what a
focused industry might have done with BI had any of these monster
companies done this acquisition work in 1999 when they should have.
Then again, maybe you're nothing until you're a 5 Billion dollar
company as far as the IBMs of the world are concerned.
Which is why everybody ought to be scared as hell of Google. One of
these days, the 20%ers are going to recognize what they can do with
Gapminder + BigTable. The lightbulb is going to go off in their heads
and they're going to see how a bunch of their technologies can be put
together into a zero footprint xPM stack. If they do it within 5 years,
then they will make all of the big BI acquirers look dumb. What Google
doesn't realize is that their ability to structure data from multiple
sources is a huge strength considering that they've built an empire
with data people have volunteered to them.
What is BI, in the end? It's gobbling up and spitting out very small
chunks of data each cell of which has an extraordinary amount of
metadata associated with it. Nobody has done that in parallel scale.
The entire paradigm is ripe for re-invention. And this time, I hope
they put some nicer graphics into it.
