Let me start with takeovers and acquisitions. I like these when they add synergies and offer enhanced capability for the participants. For example, Informatica's takeover over Similarity Systems and Business Objects' acquisition of FirstLogic both present extended support and sales opportunities for the smaller vendor involved. On the other hand, I don't tend to like so-called consolidation because it tends to become monopolistic, products get shelved, users get forced to make difficult decisions and it does little for the market though it may do a lot for the acquiring company. For this reason, I hope that Symphony takes over Hummingbird and not Open Text.

Actually, there are also other reasons for preferring the Symphony option: taking Hummingbird private would have advantages in terms of long-term product development and strategy; and there are more potential synergies within Symphony for the non-content management parts of the business. Anyway, Bharat Mistry has written about this in detail: I agree with him.

While on the subject of takeovers there have been rumours that Hyperion has been talking to Information Builders. Personally, I can't see this happening. Gerry Cohen, the CEO and founder of Information Builders is likely to look askance at Hyperion's track record in business intelligence, and is unlikely to be impressed. Given Gerry's passion for his company that is not going to be encouraging. Moreover, it seems unlikely to me that he wants to retire, which in turn suggests that he would want to continue to play an active role in any merged company. This leaves the question of which role he would like and my guess is that it would be that of Chief Strategy Officer. However, this position is currently filled by Howard Dresdner, the ex-Gartner analyst, and isn't available; so, I think this is a marriage that is not going to happen.

And talking about Gartner, I was surprised to see that its latest hype cycle report on BI and CPM doesn't include any mention of operational BI or real-time data warehousing. Perhaps they are included in other reports?

One vendor that is into real-time data warehousing (you see how I cleverly tie these disparate thoughts together?) is GoldenGate—though what I really want to talk about is its zero-downtime migration capabilities. I recently wrote an article about Informatica's focus on application migration, which resulted in a number of comments, the most interesting of which was from GoldenGate. The company specialises in real-time synchronisation and replication, which it then deploys in a number of environments, including real-time data warehousing and application migration. In the latter case it focuses on environments (in healthcare, for example) where downtime is a complete no-no. Such projects are not for the faint hearted, typically taking six to nine months but failback to the original version is supported and downtime is absolutely minimised: it may not actually be zero but one recent project had just four minutes of downtime (to change over application servers), which is pretty close. Definitely worth a look.

In addition, there are several other vendors that are similarly worth considering, and which have been sitting in my to-write-about file for months. These include Agentis, which provides an agent-based goal-driven development environment; LogLogic, which provides an appliance that will log data from any source (firewall logs, VPN logs, database logs and so on); and Insightful, whose S-Plus 8 is much more scalable for statistics processing and data mining then previous versions of the product.

And finally, and returning to where I began, I would like to congratulate IBM on the series of strategic acquisitions it has made over the last couple of years: not so much Ascential (though I have nothing against that) but more the smaller companies such as Venetica for content management federation, the two master data management companies it acquired, SRD and LAS that are now within the Entity Analytic Solutions (EAS) group and, most recently, Unicorn. The company is clearly targeting best-of-breed solutions to extend its capabilities in designated areas, which is how it should be.