As we’ve said before, consolidation is a watch-word for 2011. Every week we’re seeing acquisitions in the cloud, data analysis and enterprise social software market. We’ve already covered one of this week’s biggest announcements: RIM’s acquisition of Gist. Here are three more acquisitions worth taking note of.
HP Acquires Vertica
This is likely the biggest acquisition of the week. HP announced it would purchase enterprise data warehousing vendor Vertica Monday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Last month HP killed off its previous data warehousing product line Neoview, though it had been neglecting it for some time. Some observers wrote that HP had given up on the business intelligence market. As Forrester‘s James Kobielus writes, HP is actually ramping up its enterprise data management offerings with this acquisition.
DDMS2 suggests that HP should also purchase StreamBase and VoltDB and fold VoltDB into Vertica.
Vertica is a columnar database, a system that some observers believe to be the future of datawarehousing. On the other hand, there are also new approaches to data warehousing such as those detailed by Colin White.
We covered the significance of data warehousing consolidation last year when IBM acquired Netezza.
OpenText Completes Acquisition of Metastorm
Today enterprise CMS vendor OpenText completed its acquisition of business process management vendor Metastorm. When the deal was first announced earlier this month, David Roe at CMS Wire speculated that OpenText will use this acquisition to incorporate Metastorm’s BPM software into its own software. OpenText’s announcement confirms that it will be using the Metastorm to deepen its own integration with Microsoft SharePoint.
We’ve covered OpenText’s expansion into social software previously.
Constant Contact and Bantam Live
Like the Gist acquisition and Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Etacts, Constant Contact‘s $15 million acquisition of Bantam Live shows how the social CRM space is heating up, starting with contact management. Constant Contact is a popular e-mail marketing and contact management system. Bantam is a contact management and social CRM vendor.
With the social CRM marketplace crowding quickly, it’s no surprise to see established vendors purchasing younger social CRM vendors like Bantam Live and Gist.
A story from Mass High Tech emphasizes the talent acquisition involved in the deal. Bantam Live CTO Henry Poydar will now be the director of engineering at Constant Contact. Constant Contact is also planning a big move to NoSQL. It’s been using Apache Cassandra for a while, but will be replacing more of its existing DB2 servers with Cassandra.
Photo by Kioan
