The OLAP market is made up of several smaller vendors. Currently there are more than twenty vendors that provide OLAP tools with new companies still entering the market. The largest OLAP vendor has less than 25% of the market share. Currently, marketshare is difficult to maintain due to new players joining the market and on-going players re-engineering their products.
There is good reason to believe that the convergence of OLAP and data warehousing will lead to larger players from the database market entering the OLAP arena. For example, last May, Oracle entered the OLAP market by acquiring the market leading OLAP product, Express, from IRI. If D&B and Oracle or even others such as Microsoft decide that the market has grown to the point that it is large enough, they may well be tempted to go for higher volumes by introducing lower priced products that threaten the specialist, high priced vendors that currently dominate the market. In any case, with the increase in competition and sales volumes, it is hard to see the current escalating price trend continuing indefinitely.
www.access.digex.net/~grimes/olap/olap.collections.html
www.cityscape.co.uk/users/ae29/olaplnks.htm