The business intelligence (BI) software landscape is set to change again as mergers and acquisitions, combined with changes in enterprise demands, force a rethink in attitudes. With the sector is in flux, the time could have come for customers to take a fresh look at options.

The most recent BI turmoil has been occasioned by Tibco’s agreement to acquire Spotfire, announced earlier this month. The $195m deal gives integration and business process management (BPM) giant Tibco access to Spotfire’s lauded technology for fast access to information, presented in a range of visual ways that suit dashboard-style indicators and alerting systems.

For Connie Moore, analyst at Forrester Research, the purchase “represents a paradigm shift in the BI and BPM markets”.

“The BPM vendors understand the linkage between process and business data a lot more than the BI vendors,” she argued. “The big trend to look at is BPM suites plus business rules plus BI equals business optimisation. The BPM market is taking off in a big way and the BPM thought leaders are moving beyond the boundaries of business process. This acquisition could be the start of more acquisitions along these lines.”

However, as Moore notes, Tibco is far from the only software vendor catching on to the trend, with firms such as Appian, Global 360 and Lombardi also pursuing the same goal.

Tibco’s aim with Spotfire is highly attractive, namely, building processes that can afford actionable information based on real-time insights and triggers, or what some call the event-driven architecture. This adds an extra dimension to what is afforded by Olap cubes, the time-consuming multidimensional information model that is at the heart of the traditional BI analytics methodology. But is real-time BI a realistic ambition?

Steve Jones, head of service-oriented architecture at Capgemini’s global outsourcing operation thinks so.

“You need architectures that can do incremental summations rather than doing it in one big hit,” he said. “Eye-scanning and medical monitoring systems have to solve that problem for a niche today but it could be done more broadly.”

Moore’s fellow Forrester analyst Boris Evelson agreed about the importance of the Tibco-Spotfire transaction.

“Remember George Costanza from a Seinfeld episode where he was pulling his hair out about ‘the two worlds colliding’? He was agonising over the world of his girlfriends and the world of his friends that should never mix. In my world, process and data are now colliding.”

Others agree that for BI to grow up it must move on from an “after hours” analysis model.

“We need to be able to predict rather than be reactive,” said Sami Akbay, marketing vice-president at transactional data management firm GoldenGate Software.

“It’s not necessarily asking the $1m question, it’s the $100 question or not even asking but just being alerted to discrepancies.”

Phil Howard, research director at analyst Bloor, said, “What people are looking for is something like a Google UI against an Olap tool because traditional BI tools have not spread widely outside the business analyst community.”

However, for real-time operational BI to succeed, giants will have to move aside or adapt, and with Oracle recently agreeing to buy BI veteran Hyperion, changes in buying patterns will take some time.