Ventana Research CEO Mark Smith wrote on December 5, 2010 that HP was quietly quitting the Business Intelligence market. His article was also carried by InformationManagement.com. A number of commentators agreed with Smith’s assessment.
Ventana Research is a well-known analyst outfit so it would seem HP will want to refute this assertion quickly if it was not true. Granted the whole company was probably getting ready for its annual year end shutdown, but no company will let external commentary drive the narrative for its product line, especially not one as big as HP.
Finally, we see on December 13, 2010 that HP announced the hiring of an SAP executive and a denial that it was killing its Neoview data warehousing solution. As other observers pointed out, Business Intelligence solutions have continued to attract investment by enterprises even during the trough of the bust in 2008~2009. It will be unwise for HP to leave the market, even though the company has not made much of headway in selling Neoview.
This is a curious occurrence – an analyst making a pubic claim that HP was killing a product and HP finally got around to denying a week later. Maybe there is more to come on this intrigue. What do you think?
