I’ve had some thoughts on recent news within the enterprise software segment that I’ve been waiting to blog about, and today seemed as good a day as ever. Feel free to provide your feedback.

- I came across this press release put out by SAP. It’s essentially useless, as it’s simply more smack in the never ending PR war between Oracle and SAP. It speaks to the 100 customers that have stopped using Oracle’s vaunted Hyperion product and migrated to SAP, with SAP even naming specific companies.

While I’m sure there are numerous reasons those 100 customers have left, the release does speak to a more important trend playing out in the enterprise market. Analytics, performance management, and BI have become a hot battle ground in the enterprise software market. Both Oracle and SAP – in addition to Microsoft and IBM – have made notably acquisitions within this market in the last year. Enough consolidation has taken place that many pundits have said that best-of-breed BI/analytic providers will soon be extinct. While I’m sure there will always be some specialists operating within this space, the importance of BI and analytics in the CRM market can’t be understated.

Here at SugarCRM, we’ve certainly seen this trend play out, which is why we focused enhancements in Sugar 5.0 (and the upcoming 5.1) on reporting functionality, among other improvements, though rather through acquisition, I’m happy to say that SugarCRM continues to rely on internal development.

- All the recent talk about Microsoft purchasing Yahoo! got me thinking. I realize many analysts say that such a marriage would expand Microsoft’s Web presence and boost its online advertising revenue, but some see it as a distraction from a potentially juicer and bigger target: the business software market, and I agree. Remember when Microsoft purchased a little-known business software vendor in 2000? That company was Great Plains, which has turned into a hugely lucrative move for Microsoft and sent shockwaves throughout the industry at the time.

The company’s reorganization of its business software units into the Dynamics product lines was a step in the right direction, adding clarity and strategic direction to its offerings, as was its development of a hosted offering for Dynamics CRM. And while some agree that the purchase of Yahoo! could enable the company to have a broader foothold in cloud computing, the fallout would be minimal, and as Microsoft has proven with Dynamics CRM, it could expand that functionality internally, and perhaps with the money saved by not purchasing Yahoo!

Perhaps the the war between Oracle and SAP will eventually deteriorate to Larry Ellison and Henning Kagermann battling it out in a winner-take-all match similiar to this:

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