FIFO, PAIN POINTS and NEW RULES: Three Things You Need to Know About Financial Technology M&A

Business Intelligence Market Trends

...trends are vital for market participants to be aware of, as they will drive investment, consolidation and most importantly the overall growth of this market.

Information Lifecycle Management: Being Bought vs. Being Built

Several years ago, EMC (initially) and other companies in and around the storage and enterprise content management (ECM) markets began to talk about information lifecycle management (ILM). Given the ramifications of various strict government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, the burgeoning growth and need to distribute unstructured content and the ever-increasing need to maintain privacy and security of information, ILM became a rallying cry for the collection of capabilities associated with the various facets of capturing, managing, storing and disseminating information. Well, almost.

Key Trends in ERP/ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

The last two years have seen their share of M&A across the enterprise applications space, and we believe the trend will continue unabated. Three major factors will influence continued action in and around the ERP space: consolidation, verticalization and diversification.

Key Trends in Security: No Risk, No Reward

Organizations have made numerous and significant investments in security technologies over the years with increases in spending continuing. However, given the presence of ever-increasing numbers of attacks on corporate and private sites, the demands of compliance and risk management, privacy issues in several vertical markets and an ongoing convergence of security technologies, we believe this market will both grow in size and experience further consolidation.

Knowledge Management - By Any Other Name

While attending and speaking at a recent conference on KM and collaboration, I was struck by three things:

1. There actually is still a conference on KM and collaboration;
2. Attendees - all of them - had projects under way and were apparently finding a decent degree of support; and
3. Issues associated with KM and collaboration were largely the same as they have been for the last 5-7 years.

The Network is the Application, After All

The growth in web services, XML, distributed applications, and SOA in general suggest that network management and performance issues will only become more complex over time, particularly for IT organizations contracted to provide specific service levels to their customers.

Trends in Mobile Messaging and Data Services

There have been a number of recent notable M&A transactions and there will continue to be a wide range of companies from various sectors that will participate in mobile messaging and data services M&A, particularly given the variety of technology convergence, entertainment, consumer electronics and other trends that are affecting the market.

How Do You Want Your Middleware - Hard or Soft?

Signaled as a potentially hot space for much of the last year, the integration appliance market, a niche occupied by a small number of very large as well as very small providers, got a boost on October 19, 2005, when IBM announced that it would acquire DataPower. This research report describes the surrounding market and the value proposition for integration appliances.

Key Trends in Enterprise Content Management

Numerous piece parts of what used to be a disjointed set of capabilities across the enterprise content management space (ECM) are being woven together. Further, organizations are demanding much greater leverage from the information that is either under management within many of these technologies or is not currently being managed and should be. Indeed, the unrelated but unrelenting demands of regulatory compliance and revenue generation continue to conspire to drive interest and investment across the ECM space. Our reasoning as to why this will continue follows.