It was just a matter of time before Cognos was acquired, and IBM purchased a BI company. It's a good match for IBM because there is no overlap between the product lines. This would not have been the case if IBM had acquired acquired Business Objects.

There are not many large independents BI vendors left. SAS, Information Builders, and Microstrategy are the main ones. The first two are private companies with CEOs that want to keep it that way. SAS's new relationship with Teradata becomes more important with the IBM acquisition. Information Builders has always been happy to do its own thing and makes a good living out of it.

The acquisition is both good and bad for Microstrategy. It's good because they can say they are one of the few independent vendors left. It's bad because all of the major infrastructure and database vendors now have significant BI and data integration products. This is going to make it tough for Microstrategy in large enterprise accounts, which are its sweet spot.

As I said when SAP acquired Business Objects, for smaller enterprises and SMB customers, open source BI and new BI vendors with modern technology are becoming increasingly attractive.