In our post Enterprise Software: Is there any one left to buy?
we listed the best candidates to be acquired within the lucrative
Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing (DW) industry:

• SAS (Private)
• Informatica (INFA)
• MicroStrategy (MSTR)
• Netezza (NZ)

• Teradata (TDC)

We have ruled out privately-held SAS because they are very reluctant to
be acquired. (If they were willing then IBM would likely have bought
them versus SPSS...no offense to SPSS but SAS is the 800-lb gorilla in
the business analytics segment.)

The Usual Suspects

The high tech Titans - IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), SAP (SAP)
- are already very active in the DW/BI industry selling software,
services and in some cases hardware. Are any of the acquisition targets
on our list attractive to the Titans and would impact their market
presence?

>>>Continue reading Enterprise Software: Who Should Buy Whom?

The high tech Titans - IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), SAP (SAP) and EMC (EMC) - have been buying software firms at an amazing pace over the last half decade. According to BusinessWeek
the tally is: Oracle $30 billion for 56 companies, Microsoft 79
companies, IBM 60 companies, EMC 40, and HPQ 34. Many of these
acquisitions have been "tuck-ins" where the Titans have added the
purchased company's product capabilities into their product portfolio.
This is a time honored practice the Titans and their smaller brethren,
have used to expand beyond organic growth and tap the innovative ideas
of entrepreneurs.

Although tuck-ins have been a mainstay of software mergers and
acquisitions (M&A) for decades, Oracle in the last decade has
raised the bar by being successful in acquiring firms of a much larger
size and, very much against software etiquette, even completing hostile
takeovers. PeopleSoft and Seibel are the two case studies to validate
this new approach.

>>>Continue reading this post on The Data Doghouse

A recent flurry of news articles in the database industry has
reinforced my perceptions that the software titans have lost touch with
current market needs. 

The PR machines from IBM and Oracle have
been each claiming to have the fastest database and hardware platform
on the market today. Database vendors battling each other on who has
the fastest or the most features is nothing new and has been going on
for a couple of decades. But what has changed is "who cares?"  Of
course it does matter if you are a techie and you are evaluating
which platform has those characteristics. It also matters to industry
analyst and consultants that are evaluating and recommending the "best"
database platform one can buy.  But maybe the key criterion for
future database market share growth is not the best but what is the
"best buy." 

>>>Read the rest of Database Wars: Fighting Yesterday's Battle?