The Dashboard Spy

Business intelligence vendors must be counting time in dog-years because things are happening awfully fast in this space. As we predicted here at The Dashboard Spy, 2007 saw some industry-shaking acquisitions by the major BI dashboarding players. This resulted in Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM moving from owning collectively less than 25% of the market to now controlling over 65% of the space.

Let’s take a look at the famous Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence for both January 2008 and January 2007 to see how the BI dashboard space has mutated so quickly. Excuse the scribbling I did on the Magic Quadrant diagram. The January 2008 cutoff date meant that the diagram does not show the SAP/Business Objects acquisition. Go to the Dashboards by Example post here to see an original 2008 BI Magic Quadrant chart.

Between January of 2007 and Feb of 2008, we saw the following consolidations through acquisitions by large BI players:

• Oracle acquired Hyperion for $3.3 billion in March 2007
• Business Objects Buys Cartesis in April 2007
• SAP Acquires Outlooksoft Corp in June 2007
• Cognos buys Applix in Sept 2007
• IBM Buys Cognos for $5 billion in Q1 2008
• SAP and Business Objects Merge in $7 billion Deal in Q1 2008

Wow, what activity in the BI space. Who owns your dashboarding software now? Makes you glad you chose a custom built dashboard, doesn’t it?

So what does this all mean for us dashboarders? Well, at first glance, it looks like a move towards standardization of BI and dashboarding approaches by the big megavendors. The little players will continue to innovate in this space - not an insignificant task given the immaturity of this space.

Take a look at the Dashboards By Example Gartner BI Magic Quadrant post to read what the folks at Gartner feel is going to happen.

Tags: Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant 2008, Gartner BI Quadrant, Dashboard Vendors, BI Dashboard and Reporting Vendor Landscape