I noticed the other day looking in the sunday newspaper circulars that one could purchase a 500Gig hard drive for about $150.00. In other words, you could pay a little more than three hundred bucks and have a terabyte of hard drive space in your desktop machine. Considering that some enterprise data warehouses only grow at a rate of 200-500 gigabytes a year means that (presuming I didn't expect to have a significant user load, I had simple reporting requirements, and have good enough data transfer capabilities) I could assemble a pretty capable data warehouse for limited reporting on a machine that might (overall) cost less than a few thousand dollars.

Would anyone want to do this? Probably not your Fortune 100 folks, but it is indicative of the way that we are poised to enable and deploy business intelligence to the medium and even small business constituency. Consider (in addition) the fact that most commonly used BI tool is Microsoft Excel, and now all of a sudden we have the potential for a "break-out" business in turn-key BI. What do you think?

I got a press release yesterday announcing SAP's acquisition of Business Objects. Clearly, what had been a series of successive acquisitons of componentry in the BI space is appearing to be a successful business strategy in terms of market capitalization and establishing value in the process of "gussying up" for the big wedding. What is interesting about SAP's acquisition of BOBJ is that SAP's previous acquisitons have tended to be on a lower scale, giving the impression that they were less interested in a purchase of this scale in terms of a technology capture. However, this appears to be a nice fit, especially as business performance and productivity emerges as the next hot spot in the BI space.

Incorporating the BOBJ suite with SAP's offerings provides a path for their transition away from the "monolithic" approach and a little more towards democratization; BOBJ's own previous purchases include ETL (Acta), data quality (FirstLogic), and reporting/delivery (Crystal) will add a distinctive layer to SAP's existing software prominence.