I have been watching the pureplay BI vendors squeam, squirm and squishly say the same lines as at least two dozen other firms that faced the Redmond fiercely low bundled-pricing firing squad:
“Gosh darn, we welcome Microsofts low, low, temporarily well below amortized productions costs and industry standard pricing, it affirms the market and we look forward to competing with them for as long as they deem necessary to charge nothing for their complete BI stack while also low balling their price for SQL Server database … its just wonderful.”
Well finally Business Objects has decided to return fire. They have aligned themselves with MySQL and are offering database+BI packaging that starts to return fire on SQL Server and its free BI Stack. This is because as we have pointed out in a piece on Intelligent Enterprise, MySQL through savvy use of specialized tables, can be better tuned to BI and data warehousing applications. It will be interesting to see what Actuate, Hyperion, MicroStrategy, SAS, and other BI vendors do. If they are afraid of offending the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase – take a look at what every one of those vendors are doing in the BI marketplace – yep, led by Redmond and Gartners call for “consolidation in the BI industry”, its lots of bigtime bundling and open hunting season on pureplay BI vendors.
(c)JBSurveyer 2005