The play unfolding is a consequence of the growth of cloud computing providers taking over the lion’s share of new hosting. When all your infrastructure is on AWS, Azure or Google Compute, it takes a very strong reason to not use your provider’s fully managed data warehouse solution.
The writing is also on the wall that the same cloud providers will be providing the front end to this data. Add some analyst and data infrastructure spending and you get a fully unified data warehouse in the sky for a fraction of what it cost Google, Facebook or Netflix 10 years ago.
Most vertical analytics providers are going to need to start having strong answers to “why can’t I just run everything you provide as a SQL query on top of my company’s data on Redshift?” The gold rush in two-person SaaS vertical analytics companies is going to start looking more and more grim.