BI tools market

Three weeks ago I wrote that the for sale sign was up at Business Objects, Mark Rittman (who seems to be turning into a newshound with other hot topical stories such as Tom Kyte's beard) flagged the proposed acquisition by SAP soon after the story broke on Sunday. Although there is still a chance that a bidding war may erupt (it did for RETEK) it is almost certain than come 2008 Business Objects will be part SAP.

The stock price of Cognos advances on speculation that they too are up for sale, messages from Cognos execs value the independence of the company but do not rule out a sale if they remain platform agnostic. IBM, Microsoft and HP are rumoured suitors but that seems to fly across the notion of independence. IBM have a history of working with Cognos and at the moment the BI offer from IBM is less than compelling, DB2 is losing share of the DW platform space and what ever did happen to Redbrick?

Oddlly, MicroStrategy is not surrounded by overt takeover rumours - their only recent announcements are Oracle 11g certification (if only other vendors were as proactive) and a new set of tools to report to Blackberry Mobiles.

Actuate is getting ready for Q3 reporting - I have heard that they may well be making a push towards agile techniques in BI reporting, but to be honest I don't see that as much different to sort of approach used by many enlightened consultancies on almost any decent BI reporting platform