Kevin Spurway of Altosoft told us this morning that Coates Analytics, a provider of data distribution and technology services to the financial services industry, has done a switcheroo and implemented Altosoft Insight as the platform for the latest version of its flagship Management Money Dashboard (MMD) solution. Coates’ MMD delivers aggregated industry sales data combined with advanced metrics, analytics and custom research, enabling Coates’ blue chip list of financial services clients to analyze, track, and optimize sales activities.

The blue chip clients are really quite blue: We're talking about 30 of the 50 top asset managers in the nation. Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, etc.

Quote from the happy customer:

“Sales, marketing, financial, and operations executives at many of the world’s largest financial services organizations rely on Managed Money Dashboard to optimize their business activities,” said Frank Coates, CEO, Coates Analytics. “Our business, and our customers’ success, depends on MMD. We needed a BI platform that was easy to implement and cost effective, but capable of delivering leading edge features like real-time event monitoring, advanced dashboard-based visualization, and incident management. We evaluated available business intelligence technologies and ruled them out because they inevitably required an expensive warehouse-based architecture and significant custom development to support our requirements. Altosoft offered a superior approach that delivered functional breadth and depth, ease of use, and implementation speed.”

***For continuing coverage of the Gartner BI Summit 2008 and all ebizQ BI news, sign up for the weekly ebizQ BI Update by simply entering your email address and ticking the BI box right here!***

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Had a great conversation this morning with Ted Wilson, VP at California-based SL. He talked about the many satisfied customers they have for their toolset of real time dashboard visibility, including Harrah's, Wachovia, Bank of America and Orbitz. I look forward to recording an ebizQ podcast with one of their customers in the next few weeks, most likely right before our long awaited Event Processing Virtual Conference.

SL is also partnering with a ton of vendors in the event processing space, providing BAM and event processing visibility tools to companies we work with quite often such as TIBCO, Progress, BEA, Oracle, Streambase, Aleri and many others.

***For continuing coverage of the Gartner BI Summit 2008 and all ebizQ BI news, sign up for the weekly ebizQ BI Update by simply entering your email address and ticking the BI box right here!***

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I just had a great conversation with Sami Akbay and Deirdre Mahon of GoldenGate, who told me a little more about their very interesting news that we published yesterday, regarding their partnership with SinglePoint, a mobile media interactivity specialist.

Turns out that the title of our news coverage, which was "GoldenGate's Real-Time Data Solution Deployed for Interactive Television," could have been a lot more stylish. That's because GoldenGate's solution is used, with SinglePoint, on interactive television shows, most notably shows like Project Runway, an Emmy-nominated series in which a group of talented fashion designers - selected from thousands of hopefuls - compete in creative challenges for the opportunity to show at New York's Fashion Week.

Results from public votes from text messages are delivered to the show's host and producers in real time, so that they can alter the show's focus, also in real time.

Supermodel Heidi Klum heads a panel of industry luminaries, including top women's and men's wear designer Michael Kors and Elle Magazine fashion director Nina Garcia, who serve as judges and industry mentors charged with selecting and molding the budding designers. Tim Gunn, Chief Creative Officer at Liz Claiborne, Inc. acts as mentor to the contestants.

So, in essence, these cool, stylish people mentioned above must be really enjoying the benefits of GoldenGate's excellent product. I bet they are constantly talking about how much they love GoldenGate and SinglePoint, like on the red carpet and on movie sets and fashion shows and in fancy restaurants and with all their friends. Wow, this is all so exciting. Who needs People Magazine, when you have ebizQ?

***For continuing coverage of the Gartner BI Summit 2008 and all ebizQ BI news, sign up for the weekly ebizQ BI Update by simply entering your email address and ticking the BI box right here!***

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So far, I have a "light" schedule of press briefings here in cloudy Chicago for the Gartner BI Summit. I'm meeting with the following companies, and if you don't see yourself on this list, email us at editor at ebizQ.net and we will try to squeeze you in.

GoldenGate, TIBCO/Spotfire, LogiXML, Altosoft, Information Builders, Cognos (an IBM company), Kalido, SL Corp., Actuate, DatAllegro, and Tagetik.

***For continuing coverage of the Gartner BI Summit 2008 and all ebizQ BI news, sign up for the weekly ebizQ BI Update by simply entering your email address and ticking the BI box >right here.***

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Hi folks and greetings from Chicago, where I'm meeting and greeting at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2008. There's already some news out, from a new company for my radar screen, Tagetik, and I'm looking forward to much more as the next couple of days unfold. If you're here and want to meet up, email me at editor at ebizQ.net.

***For continuing coverage of the Gartner BI Summit 2008 and all ebizQ BI news, sign up for the weekly ebizQ BI Update by simply entering your email address and ticking the BI box >right here.***

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Following on its repurchase of $18 billion worth of its own stock last year, IBM decided to re-coup some of its investments and spend some of its own money on itself by buying back $15 billion worth of stock today. The markets are happy with this kind of confidence and even the bleak news about housing foreclosures in the U.S. hasn't brought it down.

However, buried in its release of the new version of IBM's System Z out today is the new on demand analytics software, Cognos 8 BI.

IBM today is announcing new Information on Demand software for System z, including Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) for System z. IBM Cognos 8 BI for System z combines the proven reporting and analysis capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI with the power and reliability of System z, enabling customers to use their data for competitive advantage, improve decision-making and optimize their business performance. IBM is also announcing a Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z customer beta program. IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z will be available in the second half of 2008.

IBM’s Information on Demand strategy is helping customers gain access to the right information they need, when they need it, along with key business insights needed to address and respond to changing market demands. By deploying Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, customers will be able to easily report and analyze hundred of millions of transactions directly on the mainframe - ensuring everyone across the organization can quickly identify and respond to critical business trends.

IBM is also announcing the immediate availability of DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition, which provides a new one-time-charge offering that enables the deployment of new application workloads. This offering strengthens the role of System z as a cornerstone for key business initiatives such as SOA, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and packaged applications such as SAP. DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition and IBM Information Server enable System z clients to further deliver trusted information for their dynamic warehousing requirements.

In addition, IBM will bring new Master Data Management capabilities to System z in the second half of this year. This will include the InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Linux on System z, which allows businesses to centrally manage customer, product, and account data for use across an enterprise.

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When I spoke to Paul Clark of Business Objects last March at the Gartner Business Intelligence conference, he said there was no way the Paris-based company would become part of a larger entity. They valued their independence. The company's buy of Inxight Software as well as Cartesis in the last year seemed to indicate a continued, sustained interest in steering the ship.

That is, until now. Reports out of Reuters yesterday has the company looking for a buyer, and SAP is said to be interested, along with Oracle and IBM, of course. Goldman Sachs has been called in to find the company a new investor.

In typical Business Objects fashion, the company says this is a rumor. And they said they don't report on rumors. More info on "the rumor" here.

Stock in Business Objects rose today on this news. More to follow as it comes.

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From an ebizQ feature:

Data has never been more plentiful and available. Unfortunately, having access to data is not the same as effectively using it. Users with the opportunity to analyze more data are often overwhelmed and frustrated by the amount of effort required to make sense of it all. Most organizations today use tools that were developed for much simpler times. These applications fail to present information clearly to business users when there are multiple dimensions of data to integrate into a decision.

Check out this great article. I strongly recommend.

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ebizQ's BI in Action virtual conference is today, with a full slate of top speakers from Gartner (Bill Gassman), Forrester (Boris Evelson), and some great panels featuring my favorite ebizQ rock star Joe McKendrick, as well as speakers from Business Objects and Savvion.

I know this is repetitive but....

Recently added panel members: Joining ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein will be Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's BI in Action Blogger; Guy Weismantel from Business Objects and Rob Risany from Savvion. Sign up for that one especially here.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in on Wednesday from the comfort of your own desk. No travel required! It will be great. Don't forget to sign up here!

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I'm so excited I just can't hide it. ebizQ's BI in Action virtual conference is Wednesday, with a full day of top speakers from Gartner (Bill Gassman), Forrester (Boris Evelson), and some great panels featuring my favorite ebizQ rock star Joe McKendrick, as well as speakers from Business Objects and Savvion.

Recently added panel members: Joining ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein will be Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's BI in Action Blogger; Guy Weismantel from Business Objects and Rob Risany from Savvion. Sign up for that one especially here.

All you have to do is sign up and sign in on Wednesday from the comfort of your own desk. No travel required! It will be great. Don't forget to sign up here!

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Yesterday I threw down a podcast with Nenshad Bardoliwalla, an "übercool" dude who happens to be Senior Director, CPM Solution Management, at SAP Labs, LLC.

We discussed SAP's acquisition of OutlookSoft.

Enjoy it here.

And we put up a bunch of other BI podcasts today. The rest of them are here.

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ebizQ is excited to present the first installment of our BI in Action podcast series, about BI and BPM.

ebizQ's VP for Strategic Services, Beth Gold-Bernstein, in hosting three group roundtable panels of vendor representatives, to hear about the different approaches companies are taking to embed analytics tools into business processes or BPM tools.

The first podcast includes representatives from SAP, IBM, Cognos On Demand, InetSoft and Savvion. The vendors on this podcast almost universally refer to their goal of delivering "real time operational BI." The conversation focuses on how to integrate real time metrics into the business process and put critical information into the hands of decision makers.

I think you will enjoy hearing the different approaches of the vendors, some of whom have pure play BI solutions, several with BPM solutions that incorporate BI, as well as a couple with full scale integration and SOA platforms.

This link gets you to ebizQ's BI in Action podcast page, where you can hear the podcast!

And don't miss next week's second installment in this series, which will include representatives from SAS, Business Objects, HP, Oracle, and LogiXML.

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First, it was rumors about Business Objects being bought by IBM. Then it was Oracle buying Hyperion. Then Business Objects bought Cartesis. Then TIBCO bought Spotfire. Did I miss any?

Then yesterday, SAP announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft.

And today, here's a roundup of what "the other guys" are saying about the SAP acquisition of OutlookSoft:

Some say this is an out-and-out shot at Oracle in relation to its buy of Hyperion March 1st.

Including this lead in today's International Herald Tribune:

Business software maker SAP AG on Tuesday fired another shot in its duel with Oracle Corp. by announcing plans to buy OutlookSoft Corp. and its line of technology products tailored for budgeting and financial forecasts.

The deal follows Oracle's recently completed $3.3 billion (€2.4 billion) acquisition of Hyperion Solutions Corp., a maker of so-called "business intelligence" software that delves into some of the same areas covered by OutlookSoft's products.

According to Paul Hammerman of Forrester Research, as quoted by Jon Franke on SearchSAP.com, OutlookSoft's performance management product has a Microsoft Excel-based user interface and integrated planning, financial consolidations and business performance analytics capabilities, according to Hamerman. It represents a big improvement on SAP's current performance management product, Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM).

A bit more from Franke's article, quoting Hammerman:

"SAP needed to address the gap it had in planning functionality," Hamerman said. "SAP had a product, but it wasn't great and it was losing out to best-of-breed competitors such as Hyperion and Cognos."

SAP rival Oracle recently acquired Hyperion and, just weeks ago, BI software maker BusinessObjects purchased Cartesis. Combined with Microsoft's plans to address the market with its pending release of PerformancePoint Server, SAP was under the gun to make a move.

"This is a great move for SAP, and the timing was good," Hamerman explained. "SAP had to make a move, because retooling their offering would've taken too long."

John Hagerty of AMR Research (read his full analysis here!) made a few interesting comments about the OutlookSoft performance management product plugging holes in SAP's portfolio:

"When thinking of OutlookSoft, we picture an image of a solid, highly usable, prediction-focused planning, budgeting, and forecasting (PBF) system. Customers, many of which are divisions of larger organizations, have built very responsive and flexible planning systems with the product. The consolidation tool is decent, but used more for budgeting and forecasting rollups and less for complex enterprise consolidations, which is what SAP customers will need and expect. Yet SAP has indicated this acquisition will be positioned as the go-forward products for both functional components."

And the other pure-play vendors are getting in touch with their takes:

"It's clear that application vendors think the way to the business is through the CFO, but in today's fast changing market, financial performance indicators are only one part of the equation," said Bill Hewitt, CEO of Kalido. "Business executives and managers must take more responsibility for managing information if they will remain competitive," Hewitt said.

More as it arrives!

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Continuing along an almost-disturbingly disruptive trend, SAP AG announced today its intention to acquire OutlookSoft. I just met with Phil Wilmington, OutlookSoft's CEO at the Gartner BI Conference in March, and also with folks from SAP Netweaver's Performance Management team, so please enjoy those extremely intructive past posts.

Earlier this year, Wilmington made the following comments in response to Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion. I see now that it could be applied to today's news:

“Consolidation is going to continue to happen this year. We view this as a distinct market opportunity for OutlookSoft to show Hyperion customers what’s available to them NOW in terms of Performance Management innovation – not 12 months from now. Moving forward, customers will continue to demand pure-play BPM and not bolt-on pieces of technology, which presents a major opportunity for pure-play vendors in the space. Two big players will no longer dominate the space."

Here is the raw ebizQ news. More as I get it. I'll see if I can get an interview with someone on Wednesday.

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Madan Sheina, Principal Analyst, BI Technologies at ComputerWire/DataMonitor, today joins the BI in Action team blog, to blog with the likes of Joe McKendrick and Michael Dortch!

We are very much looking forward to seeing Madan's analysis on our pages, and reportedly later today or tomorrow he will give his $0.02 on the Business Objects buy of Cartesis.

Here's a little more about Madan:

Madan Sheina directs and coordinates global research efforts for business intelligence technologies as part of ComputerWire/Datamonitor's enterprise business applications sector coverage. He is based in San Francisco, California. Madan has 12 years experience in IT research, consulting, market analysis and news reporting, with a sharp focus on business intelligence, data integration and knowledge management technologies. His current research interests include operational performance management systems, open source business intelligence software, evolving data integration strategies, price-performant data warehousing appliances, the resurgence of on-demand web analytics, collaborative process-driven intelligence and the convergence of structured and unstructured data analysis. Madan has advised major enterprise software vendors on market positioning, corporate strategy, competitive analysis and product development.

Prior to joining ComputerWire, Madan was Senior Analyst for Decision Support Technologies at the Aberdeen Group Inc in Palo Alto, California, and Lead Analyst for Online Analytic Processing Tools and Applications at Ovum Ltd in London, England. Madan holds an MSc (Econ) in Analysis, Design and Management Information Systems from the London School of Economics.

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News just came over the wire that French company Cartesis has been acquired by Business Objects. Extremely big news for this space, especially considering the race that pure play BI companies are in to provide a full service solution combining performance management, risk and other key performance analytics for their clients.

From John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects.

"The acquisition of Cartesis will allow us to extend our comprehensive solutions for the office of the CFO by providing critical, cross-application and cross-database line of sight to financial and management reporting, including consolidated statements and budgeting - all on the industry's number one business intelligence platform."

Not to get into a huge fight about which vendor does provide the industry's "number one business intelligence platform," but Cognos does not agree that Business Objects is that provider (surprise, surprise!).

Mychelle Mollot, Cognos' VP of market strategy and strategic communications, said this morning, "Cognos sees Business Objects' acquisition of Cartesis as further acknowledgement that the vision Cognos laid out for customers six years ago - of integrated Performance Management comprised of BI, Planning, Consolidation, and Scorecarding - is the vision that customers want. This acquisition is late to the game as Business Objects must now embark on the long process of rationalizing substantial product overlap, technology and business model differences and integrating Cartesis with their core technology," Mychelle said.

OutlookSoft weighs in: According to CEO Phil Wilmington: "The company [OutlookSoft] has consistently attributed ongoing market consolidation as a sign of the shifting needs of global companies that increasngly require a unified solution that effectively addresses all facets of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM). Today’s announcement further validates the strength of the PM market, and demonstrates that the direction of Performance Mangement will be driven by application not BI tools. OutlookSoft remains committed to empowering its global customer base to achieve next-generation Performance Management goals and long-term business success."

Andy Hayler, founder of Kalido and author of the blog Andy on Enterprise Software, said the following:

"Not only it is a software company, but the French history of Cartesis should make it an easy cultural fit for Business Objects. With Hyperion disappearing into the maw of Oracle then there were only so many opportunities out there in this space. Business Objects superior sales and marketing should be able to make more of Cartesis than had been done, and strategically this takes Business Objects up-market relative to its core reporting, which makes good sense."

More as it happens...

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Business Intelligence, a totally right now, totally hot topic on ebizQ, now has a home right here!

I am beyond thrilled to tell you that two fantastic, equally good-looking, smart and glittering personality-rich senior-level IT analysts/bloggers, Joe McKendrick and Michael Dortch are leading a team blog on Business Intelligence issues, and you must check it out their most recent entries right now at: http://www.biinaction.com/blog/!

The BI in Action Blog is covering all the topics under the sun to do with Business Intelligence, and we are proud to offer you some of the best resources available on the planet having to do with topics such as BI tools, Business Intelligence/business process convergence, analytics, business activity monitoring, BI/SOA topics, event-driven data monitoring and data integration/EII. And if you have more thoughts on what the blog should cover, feel free to contact me or the almost blisteringly cool blog team at biinactionblog@ebizq.net.

The BI in Action Blog will lead up to the BI in Action Virtual (and free!) conference ebizQ is having in June, which will feature keynote speakers Bill Gassman and Boris Evelson from leading analyst firms Gartner Research and Forrester Research, respectively. Check it all out, and sign up (did I mention it's free, and virtual?) right here.

Next week, we will also debut our BI in Action newsletter, with all the most-talked about BI news, including blog entries, feature articles and podcasts, all in one place, sign up for that newsletter by either going into your ebizQ gold club preferences and tick off BI, or just go here and sign up.

If you are an independent IT analyst covering BI issues and are interested in joining the BI in Action team blog (for money, not just fame), please contact me at editor@ebizq.net.

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I find it interesting that two of our ebizQ bloggers, Michael Dortch and James Taylor, both are writing about BI in the context of BPM this week.

Michael also contributed a feature to the ebizQ-RFG analyst corner about BI and BPM, called BI in BPM: Business Knowledge Management. I recommend you check it out, here.

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I said I would expand on what I said earlier about Business Objects. If you were to ask Paul Clark, director of Business Objects ' corporate product marketing, you would think that Business Objects just hates all this acquisition talk. He told me that Business Objects prides itself on its independence, and has no plans to be taken over, not by anyone. No way, no how.

That is not to say that Business Objects isn't partnering heavily with IBM. And you can "learn more about Business Objects solutions from IBM," here. It is nice to see companies partnering so well together, just like kids on a playground.

The fascinating thing is, the more Business Objects protests that it is an independent company that is not interested in being acquired, the more its stock rises on the NASDAQ. And please note, while I heard a lot of buzz on this the week before last, when Oracle bought Hyperion, no less than ten people told me at the Gartner BI Summit that Business Objects is an acquisition target of IBM, though Paul Walker and my contacts at IBM have vociferously denied this.

My question is, if IBM doesn't buy Business Objects, who will get there first?

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John Brkopac, techical product marketing director for Hyperion, explained the attributes of Hyperion's System 9 BI+ offering.

John said that the BI+ offering is the "broadest BI offering on the marketplace. Most companies are happy to just get a report distributed to their audience, but [BI+] offers an interactive BI reporting module, an ad hoc BI environment to change columns or add more sophisticated calculations, for example."

This kind of BI tool can add value to a company by being able to calculate things like profitability, John added. "You can look at revenue, expenses, products, overhead, and use those layers of complexity to determine the company's future growth potential," John said.

Without using business intelligence tools such as these, companies can lose money. "Sometimes the highest revenue-generating customers are the least profitable," John reported.

While the jury is certainly still out on what's going to happen with the Oracle-Hyperion buy, there's no shortage of people talking about it, including Gartner's Nigel Rayner, who discussed it in a session at the Summit. I'll try to reprint some of his analysis about it, but in the meantime, check out AMR's Bruce Richardson on it on ebizQ today.

Incidently, Hyperion's John said, "no comment," when I asked him to say something, anything, about the acquisition. At least he smiled when he totally shut me down.

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I met with Jim Hare, Celequest's VP for business development (who, like me, is a veteran of the military-industrial complex!), to chat about what's been going on with Celequest since it was acquired by Cognos in January of this year. Celequest specializes in streaming data stores, to manage real-time process-related data, intelligently.

Jim said that Celequest has morphed from a business activity monintoring vendor to a BI vendor with its operational dashboards, "that let decision-makers continuously monitor performance, analyze exceptions, and take corrective action for immediate impact."

When ebizQ reported on the Cognos acquisition news just about two months ago, we didn't know too much about Celequest, except that we had interfaced a bit with Celequest's founder, president and CEO Diaz Nesamoney, and chatted with him briefly. We published a feature he wrote in December, which makes the case for real-time dashboards. Read it here.

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Still here in inexplicably sunny Chicago (65 degrees!) at the Gartner BI Summit, and my last blog entry of the day is about the SAP representatives I just spoke with (Don't worry, I'll blog more later or tomorrow about some of the other great meetings I had).

SAP has been working for the last 30 years on developing a process-centric approach for providing the right kind of intelligence to the right people at the right time, and SAP is the fastest growing vendor in the BI space right now, said Lothar Schubert, director of SAP's Netweaver product marketing.

SAP senior vice president Nimish Mehta talked about how SAP seeks to infuse business processes with the intelligence provided by analytics, "to convert these tools into useful insight into the business," he said. An example of this is that SAP can "write software that manages the customer engagement process and then provide exactly the right kind of analytics that support that," Mehta said.

Mindy Fiorentino, SAP's vice president for analytics and performance management, also told me about SAP's extremely recent February acquisition of Pilot Software, which ebizQ covered in our news section. Mindy reported that SAP intends to integrate Pilot Software’s core product, the business analytic application PilotWorks, into its suite of business software products that run on the NetWeaver integration platform. We look forward to hearing more about this exciting product suite, which is rated in the top four of all BI platforms according to Gartner.

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Today I met with Marc Andrews, IBM's program director for data warehousing, about his company's announcement today regarding its new generation strategy of data warehousing.

The annoucement has four parts:

First, IBM plans to provide access to aggregated, clensed data in real time, in the context of business processes. Second, IBM is bringing the analytics capability directly to the warehouse, inside the application, tightly integrated, with analytics, basically providing an analytics-as-a-service feature, Marc said. Third, the strategy seeks to incorporate all types of data into the warehouse, including unstructured data. And fourth, IBM seeks to provide an integrated set of technologies "to support integration on demand, delivered on top of SOA, making BI part of the SOA stack," Marc said.

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I met with Actuate's Nobby Akiha here at the Gartner BI Summit, and I was particularly impressed with how his company entered the BI space simply from the reporting side of the application development paradigm. He said that the goal was to bring information together to make it easily digestible to the end-user. "...to make the information easy to use, easy to grasp and easy to start working with," Nobby said.

Actuate acquired a company about a year ago called PeformanceSoft, and Nobby explained that the Actuate Performancesoft Suite helps high-performing organizations drive strategy at all levels, improve decision making, and ensure better operational performance and execution. Actuate has also been working with IBM's SOA group since late 2006 on its sets of BI initiatives, Nobby added.

Nobby also said that Actuate has been working on Eclipse-based Open Source Business Intelligence tool – "making significant contributions to the Eclipse Foundation’s BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project, integrating BIRT technology within its own product line to deliver added value to users of BIRT and bringing the innovations of Open Source to the BI industry."

As that tool reaches its 1 millionth download within the next couple of months, I asked Nobby if I could follow up with him on it and do another interview then, possibly with Dennis Byron, ebizQ's Open Source blogger and principle analyst at IT Investment Research.

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At the Hyatt Regency where the Gartner BI Summit is being held today, there's a lot of chatter going on about how to define business intelligence. The answer you get, of course, depends on which vendor you're speaking to.

But when I spoke to Paul Clark, director of corporate product marketing for Business Objects, he said that he was particularly pleased that Garter itself has started to talk in sessions and analysis about business intelligence in three parts, in the same way that Business Objects has been thinking for years, Paul said.

The three parts of business intelligence are 1) enterprise performance management, 2) information discovery and delivery and 3) enterprise information management.

Paul said that Business Objects is the only company that offers a best-of-breed offering on all three parts of that stack.

More on this later.

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At the Gartner BI Summit, I met with representatives from Kalido, a vendor which sits squarely in the analytical (versus operational) master data management space. Kalido's goal is to recognize data, map it, and then provide it to business users, said John Evans, the company's director of product marketing.

A few weeks ago, we covered Kalido's release of their third generation MDM solution, which seeks to bring the market a comprehensive, subject-independent, scalable master data management solution.

Brian Hartlen, Kalido's VP of Marketing, told me that Kalido's MDM product, as well as the company itself, was developed entirely as a result of a IT project to create a data warehousing tool for Shell (Royal Dutch/Shell Group).

I read in DM Review magazine that Shell was using Business Objects' business intelligence reporting tools, but they could not find a data warehouse application to provide global views of performance from the multiple systems for BI reporting.

So they decided to build their own data warehouse solution, and Kalido was formed as a result of the product that was created during this project, said Hartlen.

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I'm here in sunny Chicago (yes, it really is sunny!) at the Gartner BI Summit, and just met with Phil Wilmington, the CEO of OutlookSoft, to hear his company's latest news, a debut of a unified application platform for BI. Phil discussed in a bit more detail the news that we reported this morning. The platform is called OutlookSoft BPF Marketplace.

Phil said the product's main attribute is its ability to align financial and operational activities with business performance objectives, using Business Process Flows. "OutlookSoft provides not only the business process, but all the associated tools required to manage and execute the process for optimum performance in one unified application platform," this morning's release said.

Phil explained a bit more: "BPFs support real application intelligence, and with them we are setting the new industry standard for how to best achieve a shared business goal. OutlookSoft BPF Marketplace is the benchmark for the way enterprise software must operate to be truly successful in today’s environment – collaborative, accessible, and agile," he said.

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It's time for the Gartner BI Summit in lovely and chilly Chicago. I've got a jam-packed schedule of interviews and meetings with some real players in the business integration space, which include (but is certainly not limited to) SAP, Cognos, iDashboard, Hyperion, DatAllegro,Teksouth, iNetSoft, OutlookSoft, Kalido, Golden Gate, SAS, Business Objects, Information Builders, and Cartesis. And ooops, one more! LogiXML!

I'm confirming other meetings too, so if anyone is going to be there and wants to chat about business intelligence and get some coverage on ebizQ, then let's meet up.

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The 'always lucid, never stupid,' Tony Baer of OnStrategies offers his view on the Oracle acquisition of Hyperion that took place last week. It's a pleasure for ebizQ to offer it to you here.

Tony's thoughts seem to agree with a shared assessment from Cognos, OutlookSoft, SAS and Cartesis, the gaggle of vendors I spoke with last week.

It seems like absolutely everyone thinks that an IBM buy of Cognos or Business Objects is imminent.

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Business Intelligence/Performance Management vendor Hyperion got bought today by Oracle for $3.3 Billion. Did you know 12,000 companies use Hyperion software including 91 of the Fortune 100?

Raw news here.

Meanwhile, several companies, including Cartesis, SAS, Cognos, and OutlookSoft got in touch today to talk about this deal.

"This is good news for Cartesis, however we are concerned for Hyperion's customers," said Crispin Read, Chief Marketing Officer, Cartesis. "Oracle offers alternative products to Hyperion's entire product line. What will the future bring? Which products will make it past Oracle's "fusion” project?

"We have already started to see Hyperion customers switch from Essbase to Microsoft SQL Server and from Hyperion Enterprise to Cartesis Finance. The question is how much this will accelerate.

"Between Oracle CPM, Siebel Business Analytics and Peoplesoft EPM – what will become of Hyperion System 9 Applications?," asked Read.

Russ Cobb, Senior Director of SAS's global marketing and training programs, said that SAS has been preparing for something like this for a long time, and Cobb reported that SAS sees the acquisition as "one of our smaller niche competitors being taken out of the market."

"Everyone had been seeing a shakout coming in the BI space, whether it was going to be IBM/Cognos, IBM/Business Objects, then most recently, Business Objects and Hyperion. The rumors have been flying and we have been expecting consolidation.

"Both from the Oracle press release and our own assessment, this is the Oracle/SAP battle. This is good news for us. We looked at Hyperion as a competitor in the PM space and to a smaller extent in the BI space. So we will see a lot of openings in current sell cycles.

"More good news for us as well is that we are vendor-agnostic when it comes to database or ERP vendors, so we can work with Oracle's and SAP's database/ERP systems and others, and have been for a long time," said Cobb.

Cognos, whose shares fell 64 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $37.47 today (1:28pm EST), is considered a likely takeover candidate for Germany-based SAP. However, Cognos' Les Rechan, the company's COO, put a positive spin on the news. He said that Oracle's intention to acquire Hyperion is "a game-changing event for our market and opens up a tremendous opportunity for Cognos."

"Our customers are benefiting from many of our “first to market” innovations in our applications, mobile solutions and Services Oriented Architecture – all key enablers of the most encompassing Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution in the market, "said Rechan.

"As an independent Performance Management provider, Cognos customers will continue to receive innovation on a rapid and regular basis – that are based on customer and market needs -- that only an independent leader can provide."

OutlookSoft CEO Phil Wilmington also had a few comments on the acquisition today. “This is an obvious business move for Oracle as they are buying up legacy application maintenance bases. However, for the customers of both companies, it’s potentially a bad move since they have no clear product roadmap. It’s going to take Oracle months to figure out a strategic product plan, and years to deliver on an effective one. Oracle has once again created a quagmire for customers— no one knows which products will ultimately survive the acquisition. Hyperion will likely be absorbed into the financial arena of the Oracle suite while other capabilities will simply fade.

“Consolidation is going to continue to happen this year. We view this as a distinct market opportunity for OutlookSoft to show Hyperion customers what’s available to them NOW in terms of Performance Management innovation – not 12 months from now," said Wilmington.

"Moving forward, customers will continue to demand pure-play BPM and not bolt-on pieces of technology, which presents a major opportunity for pure-play vendors in the space. Two big players will no longer dominate the space.”

Yahoo has an interesting article on the acquisition today too, which quotes our analyst partner AMR's Bruce Richardson. It shares some of his excellent analysis of the situation.

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We're listening! In our ongoing quest to bring you the best business integration news and coverage available, we've heard the increasing buzz about BI and we've now added a Business Intelligence tab to our red "hot topics" index tabs. We officially have a BI audience and we're glad you're here! You can check it out and bookmark it here. The Business Intelligence tab will aggregate our best analysis on such topics as business rules, decision technology, analytics, CEP and Business Activity Monitoring.

The ebizQ blogger housed in the BI tab will be Decision Management blogger James Taylor. Check out James' always-insightful content here.

If you'd like to submit a feature article to the BI section of the ebizQ site, please email me at editor@ebizq.net.

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James Taylor of Fair Isaac was blogging live from the Gartner BI show, and summarized his closing thoughts in a great read here.

Apart from indicating the Business Intelligence industry is in transition, and of course adding the oft-quoted comment from Gartner's Bill Hostmann ("This is not your father's BI"), James' takeaway thoughts seems to be developed most in the form of a question posed to Gartner:

"Is Business Intelligence about delivering information to people or about a broader range of activities including real-time decisioning and actionable-insight where the recipient might be a system not a person?"

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