I have posted before that I think SAS will eventually be brought (or merged) and that HP was a strong contender.

Well consuming EDS will take a lot of time and money, so will this create an opportunity for somebody else to make the move while HP is busy?

What interested me was not the standard “we are not for sale” line from Dr Goodnight, or the fact that lots of the large vendors have tried to engage in purchase discussion, but the comments at the end.

Probably a case of sour grapes from ex-employees, but then again…

From my point of view he is right that anybody that purchased SAS would slash and burn staff, and unlike people like Larry Ellison, Dr Goodnight has always seemed (in the media at least) comfortable with a being a wealthy man, but no desire to be the wealthiest, so I can’t see him deciding to sell anytime soon.

On the flip side he is no longer a spring chicken and SAS will encounter much stronger competition from the Microsoft/Oracle/IBM juggernaut’s in the future so maybe he will eventually lose the ability to choose one way or the other.

There was always a view that the migraton of the International business into Carey was a move to make the business more streamlined and saleable. Perhaps it was just a way to make it more agile.

As I have posted before I still think a merge with somebody like HP is inevitable in the long term.

The comments to that article reminded me of a something I was told by a long term SAS employee a few years ago. Apparently if you were a Senior person in Carey you dreaded getting a phonecall from Dr Goodnight asking you to “meet him at the airport”. As the story goes it was advisable to take the cab fare for your trip home with you, as you would no longer be able to expense it after meeting him.

If the story is true then at least he is able to make the hard decisions when required….

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.

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.