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There’s been a flurry of acquisitions recently among enterprise software vendors, with much of the focus centered around business intelligence and analytic software. SAP recently snapped up SAF AG, a provider of Web-enabled demand forecasting and replenishment technology for retail, wholesale, logistics and industrial customers.

Last week, Oracle announced plans to buy GoldenGate Software, a San Francisco-based maker of real-time data integration tools. Earlier this week, IBM jumped into the fray with a proposed $1.2 billion acquisition of SPSS, a Chicago-based provider of predictive analytics and data mining tools.

The deals represent efforts by each of the software giants to fill gaps in their respective arsenals. But the purchases also reflect the appetite that enterprise customers have for specific types of analytic tools that can be used to help them better understand their own customers’ behavior and pinpoint more profitable revenue opportunities in a tough environment.

IBM’s play for SPSS, which competes with BI vendors such as SAS Institute, would represent its biggest deal since its 2007 acquisition of Cognos, another provider of BI tools.  That same year, Oracle bought Hyperion and SAP added Business Objects, each deal strengthening the BI offerings of the acquiring company.

Enterprise spending on BI continues to remain hot in an otherwise flat software market. A survey of 1,500 worldwide CIOs conducted earlier this year by Gartner found that BI was the top area for IT spending this year.

Vendors like Oracle and IBM certainly see the opportunities available in the market to them, particularly as revenues for new enterprise software licenses has ebbed. While it wouldn’t be surprising if Oracle were to make a play for a larger, more established BI vendor such as Sybase in order to wrest more BI market share and eliminate another competitor, expect to see more deals for niche BI and predictive analytics providers such as SPSS as the major players in the market continue to shore up their strategic offerings.

Comments (1)

	1. 07-29-2009 19:04
	The IBM acquisition of SPSS does leave SAS Institute rather exposed. In an interview following the IBM announcement SAS marketing chief Jim Davis was quoted as saying SPSS customers should be worried about maintenance rates going up. SAS, on the other hand, should worry about running out of dance partners. Registered

Mel Duvall

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