Most technology sectors go through a certain maturity cycle. At the beginning of the cycle a number of pure-play companies, flush with venture capital in their pockets, come in for the gold rush. Next, a few of them crash and burn while a few others gain revenue momentum and significant name-recognition. Meanwhile, the majority of companies tend toward the neither extreme and just “keep on truckin.”
Consolidation comes next: Some companies merge, a few get stronger and remain independent, and several more are acquired — often by established enterprise vendors.
The big data and analytics world is entering that consolidation phase right now. Just last week TIBCO Software announced it was acquiring the commercial open-source analytics provider Jaspersoft for $185 million. Jaspersoft will join TIBCO’s analytics portfolio, established by the acquisition of Spotfire back in 2007. TIBCO has built out its analytics platform quite a bit since then, with the acquisitions of Streambase in June of last year and of Extended Results in September.
TIBCO may be in the enterprise integration and middleware business but analytics is ever more important in that sphere. The two fields intersect in the zones of operational analytics and what used to get called BAM (business activity monitoring), with machine data analytics as a close cousin.
