SAP announced on 8 October 2007 that it had agreed a friendly acquisition of Business Objects, the industry leader in business intelligence applications. This is quite an interesting acquisition because it was only back in July this year that Business Objects acquired Inxight Software Inc. which though still a small business in BI terms had developed some very neat text mining software linked to data visualisation. Indeed only a few days previous to the SAP announcement Business Objects released details of a new range of text analysis products based on the Inxight technology. Now the technology, and the 44,000 customers of Business Objects, have the sales muscle of SAP behind it, and that is quite something. SAP itself has around 40,000 customers. There will be some overlap with the Business Objects customer basis but overall the acquisition will grow the net client base to something that will make even Google envious.  SAP itself has good search functionality through its NetWeaver Enterprise Search application, but this has not been actively promoted as a "stand alone" search application.

With this acquisition a few magical quadrants may need to be reassessed in the near future. There is no doubt that the business intelligence vendors want to enrich their search offerings, and the move by Business Objects to take Inxight into the fold was very timely, and left their competitors to work out what might be left. In addition Business Objects recently announced a closer business relationship with Adobe, who know more about text management than most people.

At present SAP says that it will leave Business Objects as a separate business entity, but that is what most acquirers say! Another aspect of this acquisition is that not only does it raise the potential of search from a business intelligence vendor but also the potential of text mining and analysis. This topic is one of the themes at the International Chemical Information Conference in Barcelona later this month. I'm certainly looking forward to attending the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Amsterdam in February 2008. My guess is that more search companies will be acquired by the BI vendors who certainly have the financial strength and client base to develop search applications quite aggresively.

Martin White