Oracle's Hyperion Acquisition: Continuing Consolidation of Enterprise Software

Continuing his acquisition binge, Oracle's (ORCL) Ellison acquires Hyperion (HYSL) for $3.3 Billion. This also continues the consolidation of the Enterprise Software space, which is now only left with SAP (SAP) as the major other player. WSJ Coverage here.

There are, however, a number of mid and small sized companies: Opentext (OTEX) (Content Management; Market Cap $1.08 Billion), Informatica (INFA) (Data Integration; Market Cap $1.1 Billion), Business Objects (BOBJ) (Business Intelligence; Market Cap $3.1 Billion), Cognos (CGNS) (Business Intelligence; Market Cap $3.5 Billion), and numerous “walking dead” smaller ones like iMany, Selectica, …

SAP, of course, has a stated strategy of not acquiring much of anything, relying on trying to fill their product line gaps by internal development efforts.

IBM (IBM), on the other hand, has systematically rolled up numerous enterprise infrastructure software companies, and is likely to continue doing so.

This raises a few questions in my mind:

(1) Can SAP stick to this attitude, and still manage to fill the gaps in their portfolio? One major gap, for example, is Content Management. While OpenText is still independent, I think, they should pick it up. Or else, Oracle will. [IBM acquired FileNet.]

(2) Is Informatica going to get acquired by IBM as well, or will it manage to scale itself with a roll-up strategy of its own?

(3) Should Business Objects and Cognos merge, to figure out their own roll-up plans?

In any case, there will be a lot more consolidation in Enterprise Software this year!