Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

IBM's planned acquisition of Cognos comes as little surprise following SAP's announcement to acquire Business Objects and Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion. IBM's move is cleaner in terms of minimizing product overlaps than the other two, but it raises interesting questions about IBM's partner relationships and long-term strategies. Over the past six months, the markets for business intelligence (BI) and business performance solutions (BPS) have consolidated rapidly as a result of significant moves by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, leaving few independents. Among these "big four" vendors, only IBM lacks a significant enterprise applications play, but the Cognos deal raises the possibility of IBM moving in that direction as well. Forrester believes that the BI and BPS markets will continue to consolidate around these four large vendors but will not be commoditized anytime soon.

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