IBM Accelerates Information on Demand Strategy with Cognos Acquisition

On November 12th IBM and Cognos announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Cognos, a publicly-held company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Recommended Competitor Actions

► Rivals in the BI and SOA markets should position IBM’s pending acquisition of Cognos as nothing more than an attempt to catch up with similar acquisitions made by Oracle (Hyperion) and Software AG (Business Objects). In addition, while these two vendors will undoubtedly employ acquired BI technologies primarily in the service of packaged line-of-business applications, rivals should note that IBM will position Cognos as a more vendor-agnostic BI solution with strong support for enterprise applications from rival vendors.

► Rival SOA platform providers without a strong CPM story should consider acquiring a BI pure-play provider to capitalize upon the current market trend toward full visibility and accountability based upon historical and real-time process information. Vendors such as BEA (pending acquisition talks with Oracle), TIBCO, and Software AG should take a close look at the only major player remaining in this space, SAS Institute.

► Conversely, remaining BI pure-play vendors should actively seek out partnerships and/or acquisition opportunities with both SOA platform vendors and vendors with strong supporting products such as database/data warehouse solutions, portals, and BPM tools to build out a more comprehensive product portfolio that is capable of competing with heavyweights IBM, Oracle, and SAP in particular.

► Microsoft, in particular, should continue to focus its energies on improving its overall BPM and BI capabilities by expanding its business process alliance (BPA) of partners. More immediately, Microsoft should position its recently released PerformancePoint Server 2007 as a capable competitor in providing operational and financial performance management across multiple departments.

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Tableau Blends Visualization and Collaboration in New Approach to Social BI

On November 6th Tableau Software announced the general availability of Tableau Server, a new server-based solution for enterprise-wide sharing, discovery, publishing, and collaboration based on data visualizations that are kept continually refreshed with live data. Tableau also announced the general availability of Tableau Reader, which is a free browser-based application that allows anyone to view and interact with, but not modify, data visualizations created and published by users of Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop.

Recommended Competitor Actions

► Business Objects, SAS, and other BI/CPM vendors should re-assess their respective visualization/dashboarding capabilities in light of Tableau’s release of its new server-based product and free browser-based reader and its recent enhancement to its flagship desktop tool. While many vendors have rich interactive visualization at a rough parity with Tableau, the state of the art continues to evolve rapidly, often driven by innovative pure-plays such as Tableau.

► BI/CPM vendors should follow Tableau’s lead by building Web 2.0-oriented social networking features into their solutions, thereby expanding users’ ability to share actionable, visually based intelligence amongst themselves, both within enterprises and across business-to-business value chains.

► Vendors of BI, CPM, text/data mining, predictive analytics, CEP/ESP, GRC, and other dashboard-focused applications should consider acquiring Tableau, Advizor, and other visualization pure-plays outright. Interactive visualization is a strategic technology for delivering and cultivating actionable intelligence in team-based environments.

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Informatica Beefs Up Speed, Scalability, Stewardship, Security and SAP Integration of Core Offerings

On October 29th Informatica announced the general availability of version 8.5 enhancements to Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange and Informatica Data Quality. These releases enhance Informatica’s support for collaborative data stewardship, real-time changed data capture (CDC), parallel execution of demanding DI/DQ workloads, and secure access to data stewardship functionality.

Recommended Competitor Actions

► Rival DI/DQ vendors — including IBM, Business Objects, SAS/DataFlux, Pitney Bowes Software and Harte-Hanks Trillium Software — should stress that the chief enhancements in the Informatica 8.5 releases offer no bold new directions or differentiators. All leading rivals offer support for real-time CDC, parallelizable scale-out, collaborative data stewardship, transactional security and SAP integration. Nevertheless, competitors should maintain fine-grained feature parity with Informatica, which continues to deepen integration among its best-of-breed offerings.

► Rival DI/DQ vendors with strong MDM portfolios should attempt to marginalize Informatica as merely a provider of sundry point tools, rather than as a single source of comprehensive solutions for integrating, cleansing, consolidating, and governing customer, product, account and other master data sets. In particular, IBM, SAS and SAP/BusinessObjects should position their in-house DI, DQ, and data stewardship offerings as the crown jewels of their respective MDM strategies, supporting flexible cleansing of multi-entity, multi-domain master data.

► SOA, MDM, and CPM vendors that lack strong DI/DQ offerings should either partner with Informatica (as CPM vendor Cognos did recently, to its credit) or acquire Informatica outright. In particular, Oracle needs to acquire a leading DQ pure-play to one-up SAP’s bold decision to buy Business Objects. In addition, Teradata, TIBCO and Microsoft must have native DQ tools to have any hope of climbing up the MDM solution maturity curve any time soon.

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Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference: Microsoft ‘‘Oslo’’ Project to Turn Applications into Models

On October 30th, at its fifth annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference, Microsoft shared its vision and roadmap to simplify the effort required to design, build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. In support of this vision, the company announced “Oslo,” the code name for the set of technical investments that help customers realize this vision.

Analytical Summary

► Current Perspective: Positive on Microsoft’s outline for a series of strategic technological investments code-named “Oslo,” which the company announced during the fifth annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference. Oslo calls for a wide array of product enhancements spanning the company’s development, integration, and management solutions that will focus on model-driven application lifecycle development and management. Though not anticipated to be commercially available until 2009, Oslo represents a vision of application development well suited to service-oriented architecture (SOA) installations that breaks down both organizational and departmental silos.

► Vendor Importance: Very high to Microsoft, which needed to unify and actualize its two broad software development initiatives: Dynamic IT and Software + Services. With Oslo, Microsoft has sketched a technological framework that leverages existing offerings including BizTalk Server (and BizTalk Services), Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, and System Center in the service of these two initiatives that will appeal to existing Microsoft customers. Of course, in its efforts to bring together heterogeneous modeling standards and languages, the company is extolling its own proprietary and closed modeling language and repository, which will require third-party support to facilitate complete lifecycle round-trip model revisions. However, in the absence of industry standards for exchanging process artifacts, contracts, policies, and other supporting metadata, this is an acceptable approach.

► Market Impact: Moderate on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and integration software and services markets in the near term, as the notion of using role and model-driven practices to compose, develop, and optimize business processes has already driven a number of recent tooling announcements from vendors such as IBM, BEA, Progress Software, Oracle, and TIBCO. However, by 2009, if Microsoft is able, through internal development or via its Business Process Alliance (BPA) partners, to bring vertical market solutions as well as governance and optimization capabilities to Oslo, the vendor will be in a position not only to retain its edge within the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market, but also to compete more directly with these rivals in providing a highly unified application environment.