Denis’ Blog

Endeca announced today that Intel and SAP have invested in Endeca. So with these new information, I modify my bet:

• SAP will buy Endeca by the end of 2008. Endeca will not go IPO.
• Autonomy will be acquired by IBM.
• Oracle will not acquire anyone.
• Exalead and Vivisimo will go IPO.

Your bets?

8 Billions. Gosh. I’ve lost. Bye Bye the foreseen HP/BEA or SAP/BEA deal..

So the bad news is: I’ve lost this bet. The good news is that now Oracle has a real application server. .

Oh. Yes. Let me count. 1 database, 2 Applications Servers, 2 (good) BPM solutions, 3 Portals suites, 2 ESB, 2 Collaboration suite, 2 Services Registry, 2 IDE… Wow, some cleaning ahead guys….

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.