Nelson Ko's Blog

Social network analysis applied to the study of alliances can provide an indication of the industry environment in which firms operate, and the relative competitive position of each firm vis-à-vis its competitors.

Using public information from websites and the snowball method of sampling, the top five most influential vendors in the business intelligence space are identified using two measures:

1. The number of direct technology partners (degree centrality)
2. How closely the vendors are connected with the rest of the network (closeness centrality)

Degree centrality ranking

1. Business Objects (66)
2. Cognos (44)
3. IBM (41)
4. Oracle (41)
5. Microsoft (34)

Closeness centrality ranking

1. Business Objects (0.68)
2. Oracle (0.61)
3. Microsoft (0.58)
4. Cognos (0.56)
5. IBM (0.55)

Even though Cognos ranks 2nd in terms of number of partners, it only ranks 4th in terms of well-connected it is. This is explained by the more diverse and broadly connected partnerships possessed by Oracle and Microsoft, who are ranked 4th and 5th in terms of number of partners, but 2nd and 3rd in terms of closeness centrality.

Check out the social network visualizations of the 107 vendors in the network from the perspective of each of these five firms. Note how the partnership networks of Business Objects and Cognos overlap with that of Oracle, who occupies the more central position within the network.

The 107 vendors are connected by a total of 401 partnership links. The average number of partners of each vendor is 7.5. This market has seen quite a bit of consolidation in recent years, resulting in an average path length which is relatively short although distinct clusters can still be clearly identified – vendors are on average 2.3 partnership links away from each other.

Sampling has been restricted to those listed as technology and independent software vendor partners, to focus only on cooperation in technology development. A partner search was also not done on the websites of large diversified firms such as SAP, Microsoft, and IBM, as their partner lists do not reflect relationships specific to the business intelligence space and manually screening them would have taken too much time. The list excludes:

1. Companies listed as resellers, system integrators, or marketing alliance partners.
2. About a dozen small firms listed as technology partners but function mainly as system integrators without any significant technology development role, and do not have any technology partners listed on their website.
3. A few large companies whose main function is almost exclusively systems integration, consulting, or content provision, e.g. SunGard, Unisys, and Edgar Online.
4. Enterprise search providers such as Google and FAST. These are supported by many business intelligence platforms without necessarily being listed as technology partners.
5. Enterprise content management solutions, e.g. Hummingbird /Opentext, which have been assumed to be in a distinctly separate adjacent market.