Tibco buys Netrics – MDM M&A Exhaustion or Ho Hum Deal?

Firstly, allow me to extend my usual congratulations to the startup being acquired. To the Netrics team, hopefully it was a good exit for you and I wish you all the best at Tibco.

My apologies to those who emailed me wondering why I had no commentary on the day of the Tibco-Netrics announcement. My excuses are:

1. I had my head in the clouds – having very interesting discussions with various interested partner possibilities following my SDForum Cloud Computing SIG presentation on behalf of RainStor
2. I didn’t realize this had happened until I saw Rob Karel’s tweet that he had posted on his blog about the acquisition
3. This was hardly a surprise given the clues available if you look retrospectively, and all signs point to the fact that this isn’t a big deal for Tibco or Netrics (in more ways than just possibly financially, though terms have not been disclosed so this is pure speculation on my part)

First of all kudos to Rob Karel at Forrester for his usual thorough analysis of this acquisition. He reiterates the impact of the acquisition chiefly pointing out who’s left and available and mentioning once again that Oracle doesn’t appear to be doing much (beyond their SilverCreek acquisition which I also previously classified as a yawner). He shows that he’s paying close attention to the MDM space for Forrester subscribers and is on the ball even as many others let out a collective “no need for a  blog post” and “this just warrants a tweet” yawn.

Witness Ray (super prolific tweeter) Wang’s only tweet that I could find on the subject:
#tibco #netrics acquisition shows why #MDM is important in integration, middleware, and orchestration
Thur Mar 25 20:58 via Tweetdeck

I must have blinked and missed it.

To be fair, Andrew White did also author a quick 3 paragraph note on Gartner’s blog and was quoted together with Rob in this Info Management article

But the deafening silence of significance probably came from Tibco themselves with this no spokesperson, no quote press release on the acquisition.

This is not surprising given Netrics size (LinkedIn indicates 15 people) and a search of Netrics on LinkedIn yields very few employees and as few ex-employees.

So what types of the clues might have led to someone to conclude that this was going to happen and that this deal isn’t all that?
Going back using forensic marketing evidence, I found the following:

• Netrics announcement of an OEM deal with Tibco (as indicated by an equally brief, but at least with quotes press release in July 2009) – a cunning trick previously also employed by Oracle when it OEMed Silver Creek before purchasing them (try before you buy?)
• Netrics ceasing any marketing efforts (or so it appears) with their latest update on their website “In the News” section dated May 2009
• No mention of Netrics being acquired by Tibco on the Netrics website

Anyhow, not to bore you any further than you already probably are.
“Who cares!” I hear you scream. Small deal or not, it still warrants an update to my previous MDM Landscape picture (update below), which now includes a few more DQ and matching vendors for completeness. Despite the lack of excitement from this move by Tibco, it does have a ripple in the MDM pond and one less best of breed vendor in the MDM ecosystem has been swallowed up by a mega vendor. But let’s face facts, Informatica with their Siperian acquisition (disclosure my former company) and IBM’s acquisition of Initiate Systems was far more earth shattering.

Will the next company to be acquired be a yawner? Given the size of the players left (no offense meant to any of the vendors not yet acquired reading this) I’d say the best fishing has been done … unless of course mega mega vendor acquires mega vendor … I’ll leave you to your imagination on that one.