Business intelligence (BI) software developers have been trying for ten years to achieve deeper enterprise penetration than the current 10 to 20 percent rate. Now that the BI market sector is growing, three of the world's largest vendors will conduct their competition for first place and R&D 'on a whole new level.' In less than a year, Oracle acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects and IBM acquired Cognos, leaving no other independent BI vendors of significant size in the marketplace, making independence tougher to maintain. Oracle has a massive enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications portfolio, database business and set of middleware tools. SAP is world leader in ERP suites. The company's also growing a middleware business with its NetWeaver integration platform, and has a gigantic support ecosystem. IBM has an enormous middleware business and software portfolio, and is one of the largest services companies worldwide. Oracle plans to differentiate by redefining BI through an integrated suite of BI applications and tools unified on a BI platform with Hyperion's enterprise performance management (EPM) software system. SAP plans to differentiate by offering enterprise users Business Objects' engines which automate tacit, nonrepetitive and chaotic processes, such as risk management, product recalls, and mergers and acquisitions. Business Objects is still the largest BI company globally. IBM plans to differentiate by utilizing its legacy experience, Cognos' performance management capabilities, and deep analytics as well as sophisticated mathematics for superior scheduling and bio research, for example.