Era of Big Acquisitions Over, Analyst Says
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No more huge deals but plenty of consolidation in the software industry, Forrester Research reports.
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As mergers surge, which deals will work out?
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Can a company that's been losing money nonstop for nearly 20 years finally have the wind at its back?
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When Wall Street&#39;s biggest firms settled with regulators in April 2003 over charges of fraudulent stock research, the industry promised a new era of independence.
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Investor profiles are shifting, regulations are changing and buyouts are starting to heat up.
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BusinessWeek Online - The announcement sent ripples of anxiety through the tech world. On Sept. 15, J.P. Morgan Chase &amp; Co.  said that it was terminating a seven-year, &#36;5 billion technology-outsourcing deal with IBM. For many, it's an article of faith that corporations will gradually hand off ever more of their technology operations to big service providers such as IBM, Accenture , and Electronic Data Systems . Yet here was the nation's second-largest bank taking its tech back because it was strategically too important to be left to an outsider. ...
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More large acquisitions may be in the software giant's future.
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A new acquisition may lead to differentiation.
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With a series of blockbuster deals bringing merger activity to levels not seen in years, M&amp;A bankers finally are regaining some of the swagger they lost when the boom of the late 1990s went bust.
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Drug distributors would like to forget 2004. But this may mean bargains for investors.
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Eighteen months after it began, the bitter and bizarre takeover battle is over. The new challenge: Make this $10.3 billion deal work.
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With merger and acquisition surging again, which deals will be the ones to work out?
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Software got the biggest bucks, with drops in chip and telecom investments.
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Its biggest acquisition since 2000, marking its return to inorganic growth mode, after shelving acquisition plans due to government probes in its accounting practices.
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A pullback in commercial property  lending has raised questions about whether a recent surge in  real estate investment trust buyouts signaled a peak for  private equity funds.
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A look back at the telltale signs of one company's meteoric rise.