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This announcement makes sense in that there is little synergy between Teradata and NCR’s other businesses.� In addition, Teradata, which has gained the reputation of being one of the most scalable� systems for data warehouses, is doing well, bringing in $1.5 billion in revenue in 2005.� If Teradata is not acquired by either another company or a private investment firm, it will most likely become the largest company focusing solely on data warehousing company by market cap.

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Yesterday, MicroStrategy reported Q3 earnings of $1.32 per share, beating the consensus estimate of $1.19.� Revenue was $77.7 M, also beating the consensus estimate of $74.1 M.� Product license revenue was $24.5 M (up 8% YoY), and support/services revenue was $53.2 M (up 23% YoY).

Wall Street cheered the results of both companies, sending Business Objects share 9%� on Thursday� MicroStrategy shares up 4% today.

These are good reports for the data warehousing in general, as both companies are� important players� in the space.� Their reports also show that the big software companies, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, do not yet have their business intelligence products quite up to the level of the� specialist players yet.� Given that this is still a growth area, it remains to be seen if any of these 3 big companies will make a big move (either releasing a next-generation product or acquiring an existing company) in the near future.

Hyperion posted revenue of $198.5M during the quarter, higher than the consensus estimate of $191M.� Both� licensing revenue and� services revenue were strong.� Earnings excluding items were 34 cents,� two pennies below the estimate.� Despite the earnings shortfall, the stock is trading up today (currently up $0.93 at $37.25).� This is most likely because the revenue outlook for next quarter of $210 M to $215 M is higher than the analyst estimate of $204 M.

Informatica posted revenue of $78.9 M, lower than the consensus of $80.3 M.� Earnings excluding items were 16� cents per share, higher than the� consensus amount of 14 cents a share.� � Q4 outlook for revenue (87 M to 90 M) was lower than� the consensus of 91.1 M, while the� Q4 earnings� outlook of 16 to 18 cents a share is in line with the consensus of 17 cents a� share.� � Informatica shares are being punished today, down $1.78 to $11.88.

Business Objects have been growing by acquisition, and this represents their entry into the budgeting and planning space, traditionally a stronghold of Hyperion. At the grand scale of things, this is not an acquisition that will dramatically change the BI space. At the same time, it is interesting to see how the finance niche in BI will play out with this acquisition.

The most popular web analytics vendors were all there. After all, all the attendees are interested in search engine strategies, so they must all have a web site, and hence need to analyze traffic on their site. I visited several booths, and found out that there really isn’t anything new and amazing in the market out there. I had mixed feelings about this: A little disapppointed that there is no real advancement (but then, I can say the same thing about the OLAP tool market for the last 3 years), while also a little giddy because I am not behind the tide.

I was inspired by what I saw to create a simple web analytics package on my own, something that would do the basics such as getting session information, do country lookup from IP address, landing page analysis, etc. Nothing fancy on the graphics side or SEM analysis. The basically framework is now ready, and I am already using this to analyze my own web sites. With some additional modification to make this more configurable, I could make this a free downloadable resource — now this would be a nice link baiting strategy.

There were basically two improvements over the prior version:
1. MicroStrategy 8 added plenty of features for users to generate nice-looking reports.
2. MicroStrategy 8 added additional data source connectivity capabitilies.

That was pretty much it. When I first saw MicroStrategy 7, I was very impressed as it represented a big step forward from their earlier versions. With 8, I was not as impressed. One thing that was interesting was the absence of any new, more power OLAP features. I am wondering if this means that the OLAP tool vendors have pretty much included all the features that can be added, and now can only improve their product by expanding into other areas of data warehousing such as reporting, data mining, and ETL?

This is another sign that the BI industry is undergoing consolidation. Now, all three big players in the data warehousing field (Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM) have a capable ETL tool to offer to the business intelligence crowd. In terms of filling a void, IBM did a good job. However, if I am a DataStage customer, I’d be a little worried.

Why? Because 1) IBM is gradually becoming a services company, and buying Ascential does not exactly fit into this mode. 2) The fate of a standalone tool that got bought into a big company usually isn’t very good.

If I were a DataStage customer, this might be a good time to review your investment in DataStage. Is the software being used to capacity? Are there cheaper alternatives? Also, another thing worth considering is whether if you are already an IBM shop. If you are, you’ll probably be fine, as IBM will definitely make sure DataStage continues to support the IBM product family. If you are not, there is always the risk that IBM will make DataStage such an integral component of its BI suite that support for other platforms becomes lackluster.