“The opportunity is to move from sense-and-respond decision-making to a predict-and-act model,” said Ambuj Goyal, a computer scientist who is the general manager of I.B.M.’s information management business.
The growing appeal of the sector, Mr. Davis said, reflects the increasing pressure by the senior management of corporations for “tighter, fact-based decision making, especially in this economy.”
Other independent analytics software makers may well become takeover targets, said Mr. Evelson of Forrester. Among the candidates, he said, are Accelrys, Applied Predictive Technologies, Genalytics, InforSense, KXEN and ThinkAnalytics.
The broad consolidation wave in business intelligence software, analysts say, will bring increasing price pressure on some segments of the industry as major companies seek to increase their share of the market. And the open-source programming language for data analysis, R, is another source of price pressure on software suppliers.
Iterative Path 