BI M&A Continues with a Twist: QlikTech Acquires Expressor

QlikTech (QLIK), a leading independent business intelligence (BI) vendor, announced today it has acquired expressor software.

QlikTech, with over $300 million in sales, was recently listed by Forbes as number 3 in their list of the fast growing tech firms “The Forbes Fast Tech 25: Our Annual List Of Growth Kings”. QlikTech’s QlikView is a BI product using in-memory data store to enable a business (or data) discovery platform for its customers.

expressor has developed an innovative data integration platform with a semantic ETL layer offering data and metadata management. The two companies formed a strategic partnership during the last year with the QlikView Expressor Server.

expressor’s data integration and management software will fill out QlikView’s capabilities and support enterprise data governance. This expanded functionality should enable QlikView to expand into more enterprise BI environments.

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Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have been a constant part of the BI landscape for more than the last decade. The high tech titans – IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), SAP (SAP) – have collectively acquired dozens of software firms in the DW/BI industry over that time frame to build and expand their product offerings. They continue to acquire firms to either fill in some gaps in their offerings (tuck-ins) or to incorporate some of the innovative ideas developed by start-ups or smaller independent firms.

QlikTech’s partnership and now acquisition of expressor points to a new wave of interaction between smaller independent BI software firms. Previously these firms would try to partner with the high tech titans to “ride their coattails” and sometimes hope they would be acquired by them. Now it seems that the smaller firms are aware they can partner or acquire peers that have complimentary solutions.

Although BI is often seen as a mature market there are exciting innovations in data visualization, in-memory analytics, Big Data, mobile BI, BI appliances, cloud BI, predictive analytics and BI embedded in operational workflow.  The business value of BI is significantly expands as the data that enterprises can use to make more informed decisions explodes.