Is Thoma Bravo creating an Analytics Monster?

If you’re like me, you notice market moves like when a private equity firm takes a stake in one of your competitors or a company in a related segment. Or acquires them outright.

In the data and analytics world, it’s Thoma Bravo I noticed recently and thought it worth speculating on their strategy.

Sneak peak on my suspicions: they are assembling a best of breed data and analytics monster aimed at the most urgent problem of the day, that in theory could improve adoption and outcomes from analytics investments, or not. More on this later.

Coincidentally, Thoma Bravo happens to be headquartered in Chicago where I live, and manages more than $100 billion in assets.

The wheels in my head started turning when, on January 5, 2023, it was announced that Qlik was buying Talend. If you are not familiar with Qlik, they offer “an end-to-end solution for getting value out of data.” Talend, the “first commercial low code, open-source data integration software,” seems like a logical fit.

What you might have missed in this news, is that Qlik is owned by Thoma Bravo. In 2016, Qlik left the public market to become a portfolio company within Thoma Bravo’s family of investments. The strategy was reportedly to re-IPO Qlik in 2022 (but that was put on indefinite hold, as it was for many tech companies as markets turned down).

So what you might think? Moves like this happen all the time.

It starts to make more sense when you see this Gartner visual showing how Qlik ranks among the major players in the Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms market:

Look closely and Qlik is positioned as a leader with the much larger Microsoft (with Azure and PowerBI) and the now-troubled Tableau (part of Salesforce).

Next, look at the same kind of visual but for data integration tools (again, 2022):

It’s a bit fuzzy, but you can definitely see Talend listed in the upper right hand quadrant with other leaders.

Interesting, right?

Seeing this happen last month reminded me of when Anaplan was taken private by Thoma Bravo in early 2022. While not strictly a data or analytics software company, Anaplan describes itself as a “cloud-based business-planning software and provides data for decision-making purposes.” So, more or less a data and analytics company, albeit one focused on the planning use case.

Wait for it. Like the prior two examples, Anaplan also holds a coveted spot in a 2022 Gartner chart. This one for Supply Chain Solutions.

Check it out, there in the upper right-hand quadrant sits Anaplan. Take note that a company called Coupa sits right across the border in the less impressive upper left.

Just a month before the Qlik news, I noticed that Coupa Software was also acquired by Thoma Bravo. You’d think that was a misstep with Coupa not positioned in the upper right box with leaders, but no.

In a different 2022 Gartner chart for Procure-to-Pay Suites, Coupa was ranked highest over a bunch of market heavyweights:

In case you don’t know, “procure to pay” is a process common to every organization: connecting the purchasing of outside goods and services with accounts payable, which can be very time consuming and error prone if not managed with precision. Especially at scale, like in a manufacturing or supply chain scenario where it’s pretty much a mission critical process that has to be right every time and in sych with customer demand.

The sum of these steps by Thoma Bravo appears to be an effort to assemble best-in-class technologies behind better planning and execution decisions. That would be an appealing value proposition in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

Consider the complexity of the data and the web of separate systems that must communicate and interoperate across those four market segments tracked by Gartner.

I’m sure there are organizations that use all of these technologies, but have had to perform integration as needed and not in the most ideal way. In the end, they probably are not doing it as well as they should, and it’s likely expensive to maintain and evolve.

It’s a wonderful vision, but then again, the skeptics may be right that none of this is about integration and innovation, but rather harvesting money from companies with paying customers for as long as possible until it’s all over. At the dependent customers’ expense.

I hope that’s not the case because there is a need for solutions that cut across internal borders and reaches out beyond the organization into the ecosystem of customers and partners. That won’t happen at scale unless it’s far easier than it is today.

What’s next on the agenda at Thoma Bravo you might wonder? In November of last year Thoma Bravo led a financing round for Alation, a company “focused on solutions in data governance, analytics, and management. Alation Data Catalog, the company’s primary product, employs machine learning to catalog an organisation’s data across cloud and on-premises file systems.”

Guess where Gartner places Alation in yet another related market? Again, a company considered among the leaders in a category, this one Metadata Management Solutions.

Here are links to references I used in writing this post. Thanks for reading.

• The Rise and Fall of Qlik
• Qlik Intends to Acquire Talend
• Qlik a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant
• 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools
• Thoma Bravo Completes Acquisition of Anaplan
• Thoma Bravo snags Coupa for $8B despite activist pressure to hold off for higher price
• Thoma Bravo Buys Coupa. Barbarians At The Gate Of Supply Chain Software.
• Alation Raises $123M Series E to Meet Surging Global Demand for Data Intelligence Platforms