Cognos’ latest quarterly results were rather a flat affair. Licence revenue is just 3% up year over year, while quarterly revenue was respectable at USD 237M, but what growth there was came mainly from product support fees (up 13%) and services (up 10%) which is less than an ideal mix for a software vendor. On the positive side, an operating margin of 12.6% is quite good, and up significantly from the 9.6% of last year.

Less good was that there were 7 deals over USD 1 million, down from 13 the same time last year. Europe and Asia did better than the US. It seems that the financial applications business is doing better than the traditional core BI tools business, which is rumoured to be shrinking.

Overall these are certainly not bad results, but in a fairly healthy BI market they are hardly sparkling, which seems to be reflected by a dip in the share price.

For sometime I had been wondering which company Microsoft would buy to enter the MDM market. This is a key area in the broader business intelligence arena that they aspire to progress in, and was a major gap in their offering. Stratature was their choice, and it was a smart choice. Stratature plays in the analytical MDM area rather than being an operation transaction hub (like Siperian, say). It had built up a good reputation for flexible hierarchy management, an important feature of most MDM applications. They competed directly with Razza (an excellent tool which Hyperion purchased but Oracle seems to have now buried) and Kalido.

Stratature is the kind of bite-sized (16 employees) acquisition that Microsoft likes. It prefers to catch a company when it is small so that it can easily absorb the technical staff and mould them into the Microsoft way of doing things. When it has deviated from this rule (Great Plains, Navision) it has discovered why this was a good rule in the first place.

Congratulations to Ian Ahern, who impressed me on the several occasions I met with him. He also supports my (possibly biased) thesis that all the best MDM people are Brits. The terms of the deal are not public, and it would have been interesting to see what valuation a good MDM vendor achieved; I am sure it worked out well for Stratature’s shareholders. This now leaves Kalido as the main remaining independent analytic MDM vendor. This is not necessarily a bad thing for Kalido. Informatica has shown how you can thrive once your competitors get swallowed by the behemoths. Being stack-neutral in data management carries advantages.

Business Objects continues to broaden its offerings, in this case into the area of text search by buying Inxight , a company that was founded in 1997 based on research at Xerox Parc, and steadly built up an impressive customer list, partly through OEM arrangements. Its technology competes with Autonomy, Clear Forest and Stratify, and is strong in the area of multi-language support. The company had struggled somewhat in terms of market momentum, especially given the very hefty venture capital financing that it received (it was up to a $22M Series D round by 2002, following $29M of funds in 2001). Although its numbers are not public (and the purchase price is unclear at this point), it seems unlikely that it was yet profitable. Business Objects strong balance sheet provides a sensible home for the technology, and Business Objects’ very capable sales and marketing is a good match for a company with strong technology which has not executed that well in these areas. Text search is certainly an important and growing area in these days of increased regulation, and this adds a useful additional arrow to the Business Objects technology quiver.

I wondered what Foster Hinshaw would get up to after he left Netezza, and now we know. He has set up the rather awkwardly named Dataupia, a data warehouse appliance with a difference. It is an important difference, as his appliance runs on Oracle rather than on a proprietary database like Netezza. It will also run on DB2 or SQL Server, for that matter. You just plug in MPP capable hardware to take advantage of the appliance. This is important, since having a proprietary database brings with it not only a certain amount of cost and new skills required, but also makes conservative corporate buyers nervous. If you are a Telco with really vast amounts of transaction data then this trade off may be worthwhile, as indeed can be seen in Netezza’s considerable success, but if you could get much of the benefit (and this is unclear since at this stage there are no comparative performance figures) while still running on your existing mainstream database, this would sooth the nerves of corporate CIO types who might otherwise try and block the introduction of a new database. Just as importantly, it allows existing data warehouse applications to be able to claim appliance like performance boosts. While the vast bulk of data warehouses today are custom built, this ought to be of interest to true data warehouse applications such as Kalido, which could presumably easily run on top of Dataupia’s appliance.

I think this is a very interesting development, assuming that the new product delivers on its promise. The market for an appliance capable of running on a mainstream database platform ought to be much broader than the set of applications that currently addressed by hardware appliances (or even software-based ones with their own database like Kognitio).

Tibco has made a serious foray into the business intelligence area via its announced acquisition of Spotfire this week. Spotfire has built up an excellent position in the visualisation space, starting in the pharmaceutical industry and then expanding into areas like upstream oil services. Based in Stockholm, it has successfully penetrated the US market, and its CEO Chriotopher Ahlberg has always impressed me. In a sea of failed visualisation vendors which never seem to catch on properly, Spotfire has a been a rare commercial success.

Spotfire’s revenues are not public, but are likely to be around USD 50M, so the USD 195M cash price paid for the company is a healthy one, reflecting Spotfire’s excellent momentum and differentiated technology. What will be interesting is to see whether Tibco is really the company that is best placed to exploit Spotfire’s technology. Tibco’s strong position in financial services will give Spotfire access to an attractive market. and while the companies’ technologies are broadly complementary, visualisation is a different animal than EAI, so it is less clear to me that the Tibco salesforce will be ideally placed to understand and successfully explain the benefits of Spotfire. The stock market seemed a little unconvinced as well, Tibco’s share price dipping on the announcement. Sensibly, Tibco is retaining the Spotfire brand and keeping the company as a separate division under Christopher Ahlberg.

Given the scale of the acquisition, this signals a serious move by Tibco into the broader BI market.

There is a good article about business ownership and MDM in DM News, from the rather unlikely pen of the marketing director of Siperian. Although any article written by a vendor should be the reading equivalent of held at a distance and handled with tongs, this piece actually has a lot of good sense in it. The key thesis is that MDM initiatives will not do well if owned by the CIO office or IT department, since success critically depends upon business engagement in the area of data ownership and governance. Now that MDM is developing momentum, some IT departments are embarking on large, enterprise-wide MDM initiatives. The hidden point of the article is that these projects are frequently being done using software from Oracle or SAP rather than an independent company like, well, Siperian, say, but you can forgive this subtly disguised message. The point is that without the business standing up and saying “Fred over there owns the notion of customer and will handle disputes over it between departments” and similarly for other master data, things will end in tears.

I was impressed recently by a client of mine who had already set up a cross-functional business team to do exactly this, and they could list not only the department which had been agreed to own various major master data elements (not just customer but asset, product, production facility, person etc) but actually had real people’s names attached to them i.e. it was not just wishful thinking. There were still plenty of issues with that project, but at least they had established the groundwork that would give them a chance of success. MDM initiatives which are driven by IT without this level of involvement to resolve boundary disputes are doomed to failure, whether the technology they use is from a mega vendor or an independent.

The most widely publicised piece that I wrote was “EII Dead on Arrival” back in July 2004. Metamatrix was the company that launched the term on the back of heavy funding from top end VCs, and I wrote previously about what seemed to me to be its almost inevitable struggles. There was some controversy over my article, which differed from the usual breathless press coverage which was associated with EII at the time (our industry does love a new trend and acronym, whatever the reality may be). I could never see how it could work outside a very limited set of reporting needs. Well, as they say on Red Dwarf: “smug mode”.

Gravity finally caught up with marketing hype this week, and Metamatrix will be bought by Red Hat and made into open source. It would have been interesting to know what the purchase price was, but Red Hat were keeping quiet about that. It is a fair bet that it was not a large sum of money. Kleiner Perkins won’t be chalking this up as one of their smarter bets.

Business Objects quarterly results reveal a continued split between the success of the enterprise performance management business relative to the stagnation of the core reporting business. License revenue overall was up 9% to USD 137M, but though “information and discovery and delivery” (traditional reporting) had a decent quarter the annual licence revenue for this part of this business is actually in decline. Rather disappointingly, management will no longer publish the split of revenue between the different businesses, presumably to avoid pesky analysts pointing out that there core business is in decline.
On the positive side, the continued diversification away from reporting e.g. with its Cartesis acquisition this week, means that Business Objects has been following a sensible strategy to avoid being caught up too badly by the core reporting malaise.

As with most large software companies, services revenue plays an increasing role, up 29% from a year ago. Business Objects has always done an excellent job of sales and marketing, and this is reflected in the 12 deals of USD 1 million in size (up from nine in the corresponding quarter a year ago). Financially, cash from operations was a healthy USD 107M, with overall cash at USD 675M.

The consolidation trend in the BI industry continued today with Business Objects (ticker symbol BOBJ) announcement of their intention to buy Cartesis, who are essentially a poor man’s Hyperion. One in four Fortune 500 companies use Cartesis for financial consolidation, budgeting and forecasting, and they had USD 125M in revenues, but reportedly had struggled with growth. The purchase price of USD 300M is less than two and a half times revenues, so is hardly what you would call a premium price (Hyperion went for 3.7 times revenues), though no doubt Apax, Partech and Advent (the VCs involved) will be grateful for an exit. This is not the first time Cartesis was bought (PWC bought Cartesis in 1999) but Business Objects is a more logical owner. 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.

Cognos’ 4th quarter revenues were USD 284M, up 12% year on year. The 4th quarter (ending February for Cognos) is the strongest one traditionally, but this run rate means that Cognos has the tantalising prospect of hitting USD 1 billion in revenue in the next financial year, clearly a major milestone.

The results were quite strong across the board, with more deals in excess of USD 1 million than the company has ever achieved (25 deals of this size) and revenue growing in each region (9% US, 16% Europe, 18% Asia Pacific) though the currency effects flatter the European figures (6% growth in local currency terms).

Of this revenue, USD 92M was in license revenue (USD 238M for the year in all) which has potential for improvement since migration to Cognos Version 8 is reportedly sluggish; perhaps only 10% of customers have migrated so far.

Overall the figures are solid rather than dazzling, as reflected in the share price performance, but still indicates that the BI industry is in generally healthy shape.