With this week’s IBM agreement to purchase Cognos completing the trend, all the leading independent business intelligence (BI) specialists have now been incorporated into the software giants of IBM, SAP and Oracle. BI as a separate niche in the technology industry provided by pure BI vendors can now be called history.

The increasing amounts of data companies have to cope with has led to performance management applications being seen as a business “must” for giants’ growing portfolio of products. Even large BI vendors such as Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos cannot compete with the giants’ research and development investments and sales and marketing teams, and need to be acquired in order to remain competitive.

At the same time as IBM revealed its BI ambitions, rival Oracle kicked off its annual OpenWorld user event in San Francisco, celebrating the vendor’s 30-year anniversary.

During his keynote, president Charles Phillips was keen to promote the themes of consolidation and integration. These messages were evident throughout many of the event sessions and product announcements, including the release of new pre-packaged modules for Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture platform, and a preview of Fusion Middleware 11g. Phillips’ choice of theme was made even more pertinent by the IBM-Cognos deal.

Oracle is no stranger to acquisitions, of course. Aside from the costly swoop for Hyperion, the firm has made 41 other purchases in about the same number of months. Although many customers endorse the trend of fewer companies supplying a larger selection of products in order to lower cost and administration burdens, buyers and the industry itself are likely to suffer drawbacks.

Innovation in the BI field in particular has tended to come from the specialist vendors, with QlikTech’s clever yet keenly priced products current proof of this. Acquisitions also mean a lot of change – with turnover of reps, support agreements and product development plans – and change is rarely a welcome occurrence for IT buyers.

So congratulations to Cognos for negotiating its $5bn deal, but what about its customers?