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The financial analytics segment is well on its way to commoditization - hence overcrowding, aggressive pricing and puny profit margins.
There's either a grand irony or tragedy in the works, depending on your viewpoint or vested interest in the business analytics wars. One of the unstated motives of Bl vendors in sharpening their CPM portfolios was to escape commoditization in the core Bl arena, which has become a very mature, overcrowded segment of the SOA universe. At the coarsest level of analysis, . most Bl vendors' solution families have converged on look-alike assemblages of browser-oriented query, reporting, dashboarding, and online analytical processing functionality. Fueling the commoditization trend has been the steady invasion of open source, on-demand services, appliance-oriented packaging and service-oriented architecture (SOA) approaches throughout the Bl world.
As any economist can tell you, when commoditization hits any market it sets in motion a steady decline in prices and profitability. Though most Bl vendors are doing quite well right now on the financial front, they recognize that continued sales, revenue and profitability growth depends greatly on their ability to evolve core offerings into foundations for diversified CPM application suites.
Ongoing differentiation in the BÏ/CPM space - hence happy shareholders - depends on vendors' ability to tailor analytics...