Most technology sectors go through a certain maturity cycle. At the beginning of the cycle a number of pure-play companies, flush with venture capital in their pockets, come in for the gold rush. Next, a few of them crash and burn while a few others gain revenue momentum and significant name-recognition. Meanwhile, the majority of companies tend toward the neither extreme and just “keep on truckin.”
Consolidation comes next: Some companies merge, a few get stronger and remain independent, and several more are acquired — often by established enterprise vendors.
Dance cards start to fill
The big data and analytics world is entering that consolidation phase right now. Just last week TIBCO Software announced it was acquiring the commercial open-source analytics provider Jaspersoft for $185 million. Jaspersoft will join TIBCO’s analytics portfolio, established by the acquisition of Spotfire back in 2007. TIBCO has built out its analytics platform quite a bit since then, with the acquisitions of Streambase in June of last year and of Extended Results in September.
TIBCO may be in the enterprise integration and middleware business but analytics is ever more important in that sphere. The two fields intersect in the zones of operational analytics and what used to get called BAM (business activity monitoring), with machine data analytics as a close cousin.
There have been other important analytics acquisitions in the last year, including:
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Actian’s 2013 acquisitions of ParAccel and Pervasive Software
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Oracle’s buying BlueKai in February of this year
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IBM’s acquisition of Cloudant
Data discovery, vendor inventory
This is just the beginning, of course. The number of vendors in the analytics space is, arguably, unsustainable. In Gigaom’s recent “Sector RoadMap: data discovery in 2014” report (subscription required), which I authored, my task of picking just six vendors to score proved very challenging. The summary of that scoring for the selected few (Datameer, Tableau, Splunk, MicroStrategy, SiSense and Roambi) appears below:
Beyond those six players, in writing the report, I felt compelled to summarize offerings from no fewer than 12 more:
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Actuate
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Birst
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IBM
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Jaspersoft
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Logi Analytics
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Microsoft
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Oracle
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Pentaho
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QlikTech
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SAP
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SAS
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Tibco
Including these additional vendors wasn’t a matter of being obsessive; the report simply would have been incomplete without them.
Two of the vendors in the above list have already merged. More such unions will follow; the only question is when, and which companies will hook up. If the 2007-era consolidation in the Business Intelligence space is an indicator, likely acquirers will include the so-called “Megavendors:” Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. HP, Teradata and EMC/Pivotal could go on shopping sprees of their own and many of the other companies in the analytics sector could be on their lists.