January 25, 2010

#7. Consulting Company Consolidation

When the decade started, the Hyperion consulting world was dominated by niche companies that only did Hyperion (and sometimes, its competitors like Cognos and Business Objects). Some of the big names included Application Partners, Beacon, Ranzal, ThinkFast, Painted Word, Navigator, Vertical Pitch, and WhittmanHart Consulting. By the end of the decade, not one of those firms was still standing.

Starting in about 2003, the value of BI/EPM really started taking off, and the merger/acquisition of the independent firms began. The first to go was Beacon (acquired by what’s now called Hackett in 2003). The next year, Edgewater gobbled up Ranzal and then in 2007, it also ate Vertical Pitch. ThinkFast and Painted Word merged with Balanced Scorecard Collaborative in 2005 to form Palladium (raise your hand if you think that was a good idea in retrospect). Hitachi acquired Navigator Systems in 2006, WhittmanHart was acquired by Rolta (an Indian conglomerate) in 2008, and the list goes on. Oh, and Application Partners? They just disappeared.

While the landscape was once dominated by focused BI/EPM firms, by 2010, only a handful remain. Yes, as of this writing, interRel is still independent, and you'll get this company out of my (and my co-founder, Eduardo's) cold dead hands. I think I sounded a little like Charlton Heston right there (when he was alive enough to say things like that).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Checy your facts. Many of those firms you mentioned merged or were acquired by another partner. Painted Word merge to become Palladium and Vertical Pitch was acquired by Ranzal which is still an active Oracle/Hyperion partner.