Denis’ Blog

Zoho releases today a offline version of its Zoho Writer, a 2.0 competitor of Google Docs. That’s interesting for three reasons:

• First, an off line word processor was the missing killer apps for real Office 2.0 explosion. Let’s see what happens in the coming months, but one can be pretty sure that this is day 0 of real massification of usage.
• now we can say that Microsoft Word has a real Web 2.0 competitor, especially on the SME market
• Zoho Writer uses Google Gears…Before Google does

A few months ago I’ve already won two packs of beer, since my friend Christophe was betting on the acquisition of Capgemini by Infosys. I won, and I am insisting: Wipro will not buy Capgemini. Let’s do the maths : Wipro market capitalization is USD 20 Billion. Capgemini is around USD 8,5 billions. Most the valuation of Wipro and its Indian counterparts is based on their two digits growth/profitability. Why would Wipro shareholders want to loose value with a top player averaging these magic figures?

Moreover, Capgemini has more than 70.000+ people, with strong position in Europe. India players will try to acquire US IT integrators first. EDS? CSC? Not easy. Their market cap. is around USD 10 billion, and they work a lot for militaries. I would bet on smaller players like Sapient.

There will be 40.000 Capgemini people working in India by 2010. Capgemini will be 100.000+ people strong.The race is just starting. I take that bet. No acquisition of Capgemini in 2008. And Sapient will be Indian by the end of 2009.

A pack of beer?

IBM announced today the acquisition of Cognos. It has been a long time rumor, since Cognos was the obvious missing link in the BI offer of IBM. IBM and Cognos has been long term partners and the acquisition of BO by SAP has probably accelerated the deal.

What is really interesting is that this deal is closing the loop: no more pure player in the Business Intelligence field. Well, almost. Informatica will be the last one (if acquired). No more proprietary software vendors. Even if their offer is very young and immature, I am eager to see how will Pentaho or Greenplum benefits from that convergence?

The software market has been concentrating around the TOP 4: IBM, SAP, Microsoft & Oracle. They are now ruling the IT field. It is pretty sure for everyone that the open source pure players will not change that. I am not convinced. The market is more and more commoditized. The Top 4 will have to sacrifice sooner or later their cash caws: application server, Core ERP, CRM, databases, portal. Let’s see how they will handle that.