@Beachrider - I'm not so sure. The Aster and hadoop products push them into the big data space, complete with their own hardware appliances. I wonder whether there is a combination of forces; industry hesitation (at least at the purchasing level) about how all this stuff is tied together, and why it's a good idea to have both a DW and Big Data platforms, the in-memory performance of things like SAP HANA, and perhaps recognition that if you get the data architecture and usage right, then cloud hosting, with it's "upload and process as much as you like, pay for the download" approach lends itself to analytics, and doesn't involve £3m on your own hardware?