2007 was a good year for Business Intelligence

This was the year that the big IT Companies bought the BI Companies. In less than one year, from March to November, 3 big acquisitions happened, all for billions of dollars. Oracle acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects and IBM acquired Cognos. Few areas are in a process of consolidation as the Business Intelligence industry. This consolidation is happening because technology is essential for develop any company and the deeper knowledge about information is increasingly fundamental to create business strategy for the future, and that is the main role of BI companies. For those companies, those acquisitions are important to support a competition in a consolidated scenario.

The pressure for low-cost of tools helped strengthen some trends, like Software as a Service (SaaS) and open source BI (OSBI). The SaaS came definitely to Business Intelligence. New BI vendors appeared in the marketplace offering products using SaaS model and some traditional BI vendors are offering their own products as SaaS.

The open source BI (OSBI) also received more attention in 2007. The success of open source and collaborative development in the other areas of IT industry, like Operational System (Linux), Database (MySql and PostgreSql) and Application Server (Jboss), are making the companies look to OSBI with attention. There are several companies (Pentaho, Talend, Actuate, JasperSoft and others) developing OSBI products, providing a different approach to the marketplace.

I think 2007 was a good year for Business Intelligence and 2008 promise much more.

PS - This post was originally published in 1/31/2008, in my old blog: http://mjfb.wordpress.com/