SaaS – the next frontier for buying activity in BI?

Having successfully established itself in CRM, software as a service (SaaS) has now surfaced as the delivery model du jour in the business intelligence (BI) sector. The number of vendors offering some type of BI or BI-related hosted service is now in the double digits, up from less than a handful last year. Consolidation is still at an early stage with Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ) and Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN) leading acquisition activity. Business Objects acquired SaaS platform provider Nsite Software in a deal we valued at $8m last November. Two months later, Cognos picked up Celequest for $12m (based on our estimate), which provided the company with – among other capabilities – a hosted real-time dashboard service.

Possible acquirers

Company Cash and short-term investments Microsoft $28.2bn (as of March 31) Oracle $6.4bn (as of February 28) SAP $5.1bn (as of March 31) HP $12.3bn (as of April 30) IBM $10.8bn (as of March 31)

Possible targets

Company Recent funding/total funding Verix $12.75m (February 2006)/$18.9m Oco $14.5m (January 2007)/Not disclosed SeaTab Software $3.5m (February 2007)/$4.5m Adaptive Planning $7.5m (December 2006)/$19m

Conclusion

Verix, SeaTab, Adaptive Planning and Oco are by no means the only attractive acquisition candidates with hosted BI-related services. LucidEra, probably the best-known startup in this space, is another. Several consulting companies including OnDemandIQ, which has a hosted dashboard and reporting service and Certica Solutions, which has a hosted data quality service, are also possible acquisition candidates. It remains to be seen which of these players will remain independent. But what is clear to us is that the sector in which all these vendors play will see more M&A action. And if it's not led by Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, then HP (NYSE: HPQ) or IBM (NYSE: IBM) – given both players' BI ambitions – could well be the ones in the M&A driving seat.

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