What are they thinking over at SAP? That's a difficult question to answer. In one way, I could think of them doing at long last what I've always wanted to see, which is building a full-spectrum of products and services with plenty enough capital, resources and patience to really take BI as far as its potential can take it. I think the industry has suffered from fragmentation and a lack of a singular vision to do with multidimensional + relational + web services technology all that could be done. There have been glimpses of this brilliance, but for the most part, in my experience F500 companies don't go the whole 9 yards. Things get very complicated and Google queries are still faster and more iteratively used than internal BI queries. Shame that.
On the other hand this might just be a wolfing down of a banquet of companies (Pilot, BO, Outlooksoft, Acta, Cartesis..) to throw everything into a Universe. It sounds very SAP, which means people may be living in a cluster of modules that may or may not cohere into a sound technology package. Lord knows I hear enough screeching about BW, still after these many years, and my experience with BO Universes is that the answer to everything never boils down to '42', even after a lifetime of number crunching. So there's a massive opportunity for some product and marketing managers at SAP to work a miracle by pulling all the pieces together into something coherent and capable, and I know a couple people there and they might be able to pull it off. But that will take time and money.
I take that as good news. It gives the Microsoft keiretsu plenty of time to buff up the Performance Point platform and delivery capability. In fact, it makes Microsoft and Cognos the 'cleanest' players in the BI game, and something of a distinct advantage to Microsoft who, like it or not, will not have to drag a large customer base kicking and screaming into a new product vision. There's MSSQL 2K5 and ProClarity, period. Not a whole lot of baggage there, despite the hate that's going on against Office 2K7's new interface.
What's not clear now is where the enabling technologies will go. What will happen to MDM and ETL? Will those companies get sucked into this gravity well of acquisition? Will they remain independent and beef up their market caps until the inevitable gavel falls? And of course there's always Google to worry about.
Interestingly enough, I think the LAMP guys are getting left out in the cold now. With Microsoft in the game, it's hard for me to imagine that open source BI will be long for this earth, and I've failed to discover the innovation they have brought to the industry with all their agility.
It seems to me that there's just one shoe left to fall, and that is the one hovering above the head of Cognos. IBM is the likely suitor, if they care at all. It's difficult for me to see IBM bothering to put together a BPM story and stack, nor do I percieve them hungry enough to develop an appetite for such a business. But Cognos customers are worth something, and new big BPM stacks will sell hardware. TM1 was always great tech, and I could see some nice 64bit memory based OLAP flying on Blue hardware. But still, I think it's a longshot, and I think perhaps the writing is on the wall for any OLAP vendor who can't get acquired.
Except for SAS. Always the exception.
