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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

I remember the wave of BI vendor acquisitions in 2007-2008 when IBM acquired Cognos and SAP acquired BusinessObjects. Now, 12 years later the wave repeats. Google is buying Looker. Salesforce is buying Tableau, and probably Qlik will be acquired within the next 1-2 years too.

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Qlik was sold to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, about two years ago for $3B.

Not sure if that's a relative bargain compared to this deal or if it makes the $15.7B look totally unrealistic. As of a few years ago the total revenue of the two firms wasn't that different.

I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets. If that's true then the $15bln sticker on Tableau should only justify and boost their intention to re-sell Qlik.

Haven't heard much about Qlik lately. A few years ago we were evaluating Birst and Qlik, and have since settled on Looker and Tableau.

Birst end up getting acquired too. https://www.infor.com/news/infor-to-acquire-birst-infor

> I've heard that Thoma Bravo specializes on re-selling assets.

This is true, because Thoma is a PE firm and is literally in the business of acquiring and selling companies.

My interpretation of the rise of tools like Looker & Tableau is that they happened in part because of that '07-'08 acquisition spree. Neither IBM not SAP capitalized on their investments, and instead their products mostly stagnated. Cognos 11 for example looks more modern bit really isn't much more than a re-skin of a product that hasn't changed much since the release of 8.x. At some point IBM had a Watson-branded product that was supposed to be a Tableau competitor, but it never really materialized and was near completely divorced from Cognos.

Indeed, it's cyclical. About 7 years ago there was a social media platform buying spree. Salesforce bought Radian6 and Buddy Media (for ~$700M). Oracle bought Virtue for $300M. Google made its own acquisitions in the space (Wildfire).

But now, Salesforce now has a bigger war chest to play with.

Looks like BI is the new hotness.

I would say all things data is the new hotness. Recently Google bought Alooma, Talend bought Stitch.

Personally I'm really interested in who if anyone will buy Snowflake.

Dont' forget Metabase

Isn't that fully open source project?

Mostly. It costs $300/mo to remove their branding badge from embeds.

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