You fought with my father in the BI Wars?

(I totally stole the whole "BI Wars" idea from Ted Malone, but since he doesn't have a blog, I don't feel at all bad about it.)

"IBM to Acquire Cognos to Accelerate Information on Demand Business Initiative"

That's the title of the press release from IBM. (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22572.wss) Following Microsoft's acquisition of ProClarity (now very old news, I know), Oracle's purchase of Hyperion and SAP's offer for Business Objects, this is just one more loose end being tied up (or snatched up, as the case may be) in the BI software landscape.

So what does this mean to those of us who make our living working with the Microsoft BI toolset? Well, I certainly don't claim to know (my track record for predicting industry trends is less than stellar) but I sure hope that it means Microsoft will be putting even more emphasis on BI in the months and years to come. If other database vendors start offering comprehensive and integrated BI offerings like Microsoft already does today, then Microsoft is likely to lose core differentiators that make the SQL Server BI stack unique.

And we don't want that to happen, now do we?