The consolidation of the legacy software market continued this past week with SAP’s announced plans to acquire Business Objects, followed by Oracle’s announcement that it intends to buy BEA Systems.

These transactions clearly indicate that the traditional, on-premise software market is undergoing fundamental changes. The most obvious driver of the latest announcements is the growing importance of business intelligence (BI) and analytics as a key ingredient in any meaningful enterprise application.

In an ideal world, these acquisitions would mean that customers no longer have to carry the burden of integrating these capabilities into their enterprise software environments. Instead, it would be logical to expect the business intelligence and analytics capabilities to become a ‘plug and play’ component of the SAP and Oracle’s software portfolios. However, it is more likely that these acquisitions will simply make their software solutions even more complex to implement.

SAP could mitigate this risk by leveraging the fast-growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) unit within the Business Objects to accelerate SAP’s own efforts to deliver a successful on-demand solution. However, I’ve been a part of too many acquisitions to believe that SAP will fully exploit this asset while it is also trying to absorb the full extent of Business Objects’ capabilities.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com has taken a different tact to satisfy its customers’ BI/analytics requirements. Rather than acquire a company in this area or build its own BI/analytics capabilities, Salesforce.com has encouraged third-party companies to develop solutions which enhance its SaaS capabilities via the AppExchange.

By providing an assortment of application program interfaces (APIs) and web services that permit third-party integration with its core on-demand applications, Salesforce.com is able to meet its customers’ needs without having to make a direct investment in the added functionality.

I/THINKstrategies think the legacy software vendors (LSVs) can steal a page from Salesforce.com’s playbook and use a similar ‘tugboat strategy’ to move more quickly toward an on-demand capability.

Just like aircraft carriers can take a long time to turn around without the help of a fleet of tugboats, the LSVs can also be expected to take a long time to change their software architectures, revenue structures and corporate cultures in order to become viable on-demand software vendors unless they encourage an army of SaaS companies to integrate with their legacy software products to enhance and extend their core functionality.

Why would SaaS companies want to integrate with legacy software products?

To gain access to existing customers, in many cases enterprise customers they would not be able to access otherwise. Since it is unlikely that customers will discard their existing software products anytime soon, SaaS companies have a better chance of penetrating customer environments if they complement their installed software rather than displacing it.

Ironically, the LSV is less likely to be displaced if they get close to their ‘enemy’. Instead, they can use the SaaS companies to strengthen their positon within these accounts and in the market as a whole by attracting third-party on-demand functionality to complement their on-premise products. They can also get a first-hand glimpse at how the SaaS solutions work and evaluate potential acquisiton candidates.

These Machiavellian tactics are certainly in the repertorie of the major LSVs. They just happen to be exercising a different set of tactics in the latest round of acquisition transactions.