19. Speculation on the Future of Business Intelligence

If you are familiar with Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on American television, he used to do skits on the air using various characters he had developed. My personal favorite was Carnac the Magnificent. Carnac would answer questions by first providing the answers and then opening an envelope that held the text of the questions.

In my 2003 book, Business Intelligence for the Enterprise, I predicted a lot more merger and acquisition activity, as well as greater platform integration and portal/collaboration work taking place in the BI space. Since then, we have seen a number of significant independent BI players absorbed by the mega-vendors. I have been tracking the portal/collaboration within the BI community, and all I can say is that it is hotter than ever.