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.