SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

I posted earlier about a blog outlining presentations from a series of BI vendors.

One of the interesting posts was titled “IAP: Business Objects, an SAP company, but why SAP?” (right near the bottom), which mentions that Business Objects has an OEM agreement with SAS to provide analytics capability.  I believe that is a typo and BO have actually partnered with SPSS.

The interesting thing is whether this is a first move before SAP purchases SPSS.  It would certainly round out their BI stable and make them a credible end-to-end player.

Will be an interesting partnership to watch.

(0r was this an intentional typo and SAP is actually going to buy SAS?  That would reduce a lot of mistakes in company recognition given the similarity in names

I posted earlier that given the current convergence what were the chance SAS would merge and with who.

Interesting post about the Microstratgy conference over at Cindi Howson’s BIScorecard blog

What took my interest was these comments:

“Another interesting take away from the conference in aftermath of recent consolidation was MicroStrategy’s dance partners. CTOs from Informatica (the market leader in ETL) and Teradata (a market leading database for data warehousing), and MicroStrategy united to discuss pervasive BI. These BI/datawarehouse independents all have a commonality in that they:

• focus exclusively on only a portion of the BI market
• don’t compete with one another
• greatly complement each other”

Convergence in the past has tended to a two company dance (although Oracle often waits for one vendor to swallow a few others before swallowing them - aka JD Edwards and Peoplesoft).

So whats the chance that companies like Teradata, Informatica, Microstrategy would agree to merge all at once, and if they did that would they need SAS to round out the offering? I don’t think they would, SAS just has to many competing products for each to them, but adding SPSS to their mix would make sense.

So that would create the following powerhouses:

1. IBM

2. Oracle

3. Microsoft

4. SAP

5. The Consortium

and that would leave SAS really out on a limb, making the HP/SAS merger far more likely.

(it would also provide an interesting grouping of vendores depending on how you look at their product offering, but I will post about that later)

Time will tell.

There has been a large amount of vendor and product convergence other the last 10 to 15 years.

First we saw the convergence of business applications such as Financials, Procurement CRM and HR by the big boys at the time such as Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP.

Then we saw the convergence of vendors with Oracle and Microsoft both buying a number of business application vendors such as Great Plains, Seibel, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft.

This phenomenon has also occurred in the Business Intelligence space, over the last couple of years as we saw the convergence of Data Warehousing, Data Quality Reporting and of late performance management solutions, again by the big boys such as Oracle, SAP and of course SAS.

In the last 12 months we have seen the business vendor acquisitions being replicated this time in the Business Intelligence space, with Oracle buying Hyperion, Microsoft buying Proclarity, SAP buying Business Objects and lastly IBM buying Cognos.

So where does that leaves SAS?

Well Dr Goodknight is not getting younger, but then again that’s no reason to sell/merge. But if SAS doesn’t ‘merge’ with another global player can they really survive in the constantly consolidating marketplace. If Business Performance Monitoring (BPM) becomes the next big thing can they develop fats enough to keep the big boys at bay and retain their market share?

If SAS was to merge who would it be with? My pick is either HP or Sun. HP have started their entry into the Business Intelligence space with the release of the NeoView data warehousing platform, they have the hardware side covered and the consulting side with their purchase of Knightsbridge. SAS would give them access to all solutions in all the Business Intelligence quadrants in one go.

Sun on the other hand is less likely but they do seem to be making a play to become a leading SAS Partner and if HP buys SAS, would that not relegate Sun to becoming nothing but a hardware vendor for all eternity?

Lots of questions, lets see who answers them and when.