How to Build a Billion-Dollar European Software Company

Photo: Bernard Liautaud in the mid-90s Courtesy of London Business School, here’s a great presentation by Bernard Liautaud, founder and eighteen-year CEO of BusinessObjects, explaining how he and his team created the first “European silicon valley startup”, growing the company from zero to a billion dollars in revenue, and then selling to SAP for $6.7bn. Bernard is now a General Partner of Balderton Capital, one of the largest venture capital... [Read More...]

IBM Acquires SPSS – A Big Deal, or Not?

IBM announced recently that it would purchase statistics vendor SPSS for approximately $1.2 billion. Various commentators have been saying this is a very big deal: Bob Evans of InformationWeek: “I think IBM’s acquisition of SPSS will mark a seminal moment in that company’s evolution” Merv Adrian: “With one stroke, IBM has signalled that it believes itself ready to redraw the BI map…. Why does it matter so much? Simple: Predictive... [Read More...]

SAP Acquires SkyData for Agility and Mobility

On May 25th 2009, SAP acquired innovative startup Skydata, a new type of business mobile “mashup” application that provides fast and easy access to all your business data on RIM, Windows Mobile and Apple iPhone devices. The company is part of SAP’s long-term strategy to support the new “business users” who need to access information from multiple systems easily and intuitively. As SkyData company founder and CEO, Kevin Nix, puts... [Read More...]

SAP’s New Cloud Platform

 SAP has purchased a cloud computing company, Coghead, a “next generation platform for building web applications.” The vendor was struggling in the current economic climate, SAP Ventures had previously invested in the company, and the company already offered integration with SAP environments. “SAP is one of the premier tech companies in the world and we’re really happy this transaction took place,” said Coghead CEO Paul McNamara... [Read More...]

So: it’s SAP, for $6.8bn!

After years of rumors, the news is finally here: it’s SAP for 4.8 billion euros. This will be the biggest acquisition SAP has ever done,  and the biggest in the BI industry. In an interesting twist, it’s almost a Business Objects acquisition — it is proposed that the company be run as a “stand-alone” entity managed by current Business Objects CEO John Schwarz, and the team that looks after previous SAP... [Read More...]

Cognos Buys Applix

Only minutes after I post an entry on the acceleration of consolidation in the BI market, I see that Cognos has purchased Applix. The interesting part is TM1, which uses memory-centric BI technology that has been around for as long as I can remember, but which didn’t really come into its own until 64-bit platforms became available. The other vendor closely associated with the technology is Qliktech, but both SAP and FAST claim to have a memory-centric... [Read More...]

Oracle Buys Hyperion

After the months (years?) of consolidation rumors, finally something happened…. Thoughts: Less change than you might expect It doesn’t change the BI market share picture much, based on the latest IDC numbers, from 2005 (2006 figures presumably due out soon, not expecting any huge changes in the relative positions). Hyperion is currently #5, and Oracle is #6, and combined they would become #4, ahead of Microsoft but behind Business Objects,... [Read More...]