chased's blog

In five years the market for business intelligence software platforms has undergone significant transformations especially for the series of major acquisitions. The following two snapshots are compared with the positions occupied by the main player on the Magic Quadrant Gartner Group in 2006 and 2011 .

In 2006, the two main leaders of the market were Business Objects and Cognos: after 5 years, the leaders quadrant is very crowded.

The strategies that have marked the evolution of the market are (with all the necessary distinctions) can be attributed to two basic models:

• the acquisition / merger multiple realities to strengthen and complement the offer also counting on the phenomenon of cross-selling that expand the market share;
• inward investment aimed at developing its vision, strongly connected the brand, which is able to distinguish their offering from its competitors.

Oracle has followed the first strategy, and by virtue of the advance with which he made ​​his moves on the market, is one who, having had the time necessary to achieve a comprehensive, has capitalized on the best investments in terms of positioning.

The two market leaders instead of 2006 have been the subject of two major acquisitions by players that they needed to complete their offer and they did not have in house solutions to be developed that could compete with the industry leaders in a few years . Probably the benefits of their integration with the rest of the offering have not yet borne fruit (always in terms of placement): in particular, the couple SAP / BO has paid a certain delay in the implementation of an integration strategy that seemed more affordable than it was. In both cases, SAP and IBM are supporting, even in terms of technology investments, a development that goes beyond the possibilities of the offer they would have had BO and Cognos before the respective acquisitions.

MicroStrategy and QlikView represent the opposite strategy: they have invested in the development of its products focusing on differentiation as a tool to gain market-share, the rapid growth of the vertical axis of the diagram shows how both companies have succeeded in implementing its vision, in fact, who has pursued the acquisition strategy had to compensate for the expansion of vision with a slowdown in production capabilities (due to the cost of integration both organizational and technological). Now that you have entered in the leaders quadrant is not impossible that these companies end up in the sights of other IT giants: in particular, from time to talk about a possible acquisition of Microstrategy from HP (and previously a concern also part of Microsoft).

Finally, the Microsoft case that, with a strong ability to execute enviable, was able to lead a mixed strategy made ​​up of many small acquisitions that have gradually integrating / completing development of its offer. Considering that Excel is still the reference program for the processing, exchange and presentation of numerical data in any business, I believe that the potential of part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence still remains largely untapped.