IBM and SPSS predictive of further analytics M&A?

It looks like the consolidation of analytics vendors are continuing – IBM announced the purchase of public company SPSS today for $1.2 billion, less than 2 years after they bought Cognos for $4.9 billion.

According to other responses on the article on techcrunch, there were a couple more mergers recently in Europe with AG buying IDS Sheer and SAP buying up SAF of Switzerland (blog entry in German) as well.

This may be an indication that big software companies realize analytics software is a great services cash cow that they can milk for consulting revenues. After all, analytics is one of these technologies that needs to be implemented for your particular business and your set of data to drive your business decision making.

I hope beyond service revenue, these mergers are also driven by a recognition that enterprises are moving beyond reporting and actually taking advantage of the predictive aspects of analytics.  If true, this will indeed help companies  transform into intelligent business. Do you see that starting to happen in your space?

Along the same line, I am reading a book Smart (Enough) Systems by James Taylor and Neil Raden and hope to have more to say about the predictive analytics space later.