IBM Cognos deal highlights a resurgence in upgrading the database

Gartner put it in perfect perspective when it positioned Cognos as the last remaining pure play $500 million plus business intelligence vendor.

Now it, like Hyperion and Business Objects, is gone.

I’ve written on the demise of the pure play or point solution vendors before and discussed how enterprise-level companies will have far fewer choices.

They will also have to make even more important decisions about whose platform to deploy, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. See Reality Checks for October 8 and October 12.

However, something else is in play here as well.

We are witnessing the end of BI as a separate application. It is now being subsumed by the three major database vendors. It is turning into, you might say, a check list item.

Colleen Graham, research director, at Gartner points out that BI has always straddled two worlds, infrastructure on one side and applications on the other.

BI is in the neutral zone between the two.

“A lot of vendors on both sides of the line want to carve out apiece and bring it into their space,” Graham tells me.

So we see companies like Microsoft offering reporting and analysis services as part of SQL Server, SAP buying Business Objects, Oracle has Hyperion and its SBase technology that fits in nicely with its OLAP option in their database.

IBM was the last.

“IBM has filled a big competitive hole in their database,” says Graham. And with it, we will see business intelligence disappear.

Because it will become part of what every database does I have my doubts if we will see many new point solution vendors appear. And the fate of the ones that are left,like Actuate, MicroStrategy and Information Builders, as independents is at this point somewhat tenuous.

For years the databae vendors have been looking for a way to get their largest customers to upgrade to the next version, with the incorporation of analytics into the picture they may have finally found a way.