The end is near ... for many IT vendors and markets

Looking back a year or two, many small (and not so small) vendors in the data quality space and data integration space were gobbled up by larger entities: Acta, Sagent, Trillium, Group1, Avellino, Dataflux, Vality, Enosys, Nimble, Venetica, Avaki, Evoke, Mercator, Striva, Ascential, Data Junction... add to that the M&A activities in the larger business intelligence and performance management market: Crystal Decisions, Adaytum, Frango, Brio, Data Distilleries, OpRisk, and (as of 5 minutes ago) SRC Software.

If this continues (and it's likely that it will), this market will look very different in a short while. The big BI/CPM vendors are expanding into lower layers, where they'll meet with the incumbent infrastructure vendors. Looks like B.O., Cognos, SAS and friends will eventually face IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP on many fronts. That's when it gets real interesting. In the meantime, stand-alone vendors in the middle, ie. the E4 markets (ETL, EII, EDI, EAI, plus EIEIO) and the data quality technology providers find themselves between a rock and a hard place and will eventually move into niches or disappear altogether.

Sounds about the same as what happened in the automotive market: Audi, Volvo, Chrysler, Seat, Citroen, Jaguar, Rover, Mitsubishi, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Maserati... all under someone else's roof.