Next week, I will present first results of Forrester’s 2012 global banking platform deals survey. A total of 28 banking platform vendors submitted their 2012 deals for evaluation. One year ago, the same set of deals would have included at least one more vendor: Sopra Banking Software’s solution portfolio now includes those of past survey participants Callataÿ & Wouters and Delta-Informatique. These theoretically 29 participating vendors submitted a total of close to 1,900 banking platform deals, a steep increase compared with the about 1,000 submitted deals for 2011.

We had to classify a large share of these 1,900 banking platform deals as extended business or even as a simple renewed license — if the vendors did not already submit them with the corresponding tag. Forrester’s rules of the game did not allow us to recognize further deals; for example, if a non-financial services firm signed a deal, that deal was “only” about pure services or application infrastructure. Overall, Forrester counted close to 350 of the submitted deals as 2012 new named customers. 2012 is the first year with double-digit growth in banking platform deals since 2006.

For the first time, Forrester did not only count new named clients, but also scrutinized (and counted) extended business deals at a very detailed level. This provides two perspectives on the global banking platform market: How well do vendors play the game of expanding the client portfolio, and thus their market footprint? What is a vendor’s level of success in a given year? The outcome: Market dynamics have changed, and many vendors have moved up or down in the global success pyramid – and some barely defended their traditional positions.

During the past decade, I have worked with many analyst relations (AR) people as well as specialist AR firms. I have never blogged about them in the past, and I have no intention to do so in the future. Earlier this week, however, I saw that an employee of one of the specialist AR firms authored and published a comment on my most recent report: “Global Banking Platform Deals 2011: Functionality”.

This comment gives the impression that my report only provides common wisdom in that it only suggests that “one of the key differentiators for system selection is a strong track record.” The author also explains that this “may be at odds with the current market landscape as new regulations are set to change the way that the capital markets work and vendors are all developing new functionality to cope” – just to mention a few examples.

My perception is that the author either did not read my entire report or preferred to focus on the six-and-a-half-line summary of an eleven-page report – with a comment that is longer than the summary. Why this perception? First of all, the report is about banking platforms, and Forrester’s definition of banking platforms does not even mention capital markets. More importantly, I do not disagree at all with the author’s statement as far as the relevance of supporting new regulation is concerned – just the opposite, albeit more from the perspective of retail/consumer, private, or corporate/commercial banking.

Some people say that the old Maya calendar predicts that the world will end in the year 2012. Will this happen? Most likely no. Without judging anybody’s beliefs in this ancient calendar: Some experts say that the Maya calendar is like a five-digit odometer in your car: When it reaches 99,999 kilometers or miles, it will restart at 0. However, 2012 is beginning to show the ingredients of the long-expected stronger consolidation in the banking platform space.

While it is not yet clear whether Misys and Temenos will merge to move out of the gap between gorillas and antelopes, French software and services company Sopra announced “a project to acquire a majority stake in the Belgian company Callataÿ & Wouters (C&W).” For obvious reasons, it is too early to provide any detailed comment on this announced merger. However, I see two initial areas of interest:

• Sopra’s ability to integrate the new capabilities technology-wise and organizationally. Sopra has acquired firms in the past. However, its acquisition speed has accelerated enormously: It acquired Delta-Informatique in October 2011 and proposed the acquisition of Tieto Corporation’s UK financial services product business and the UK subsidiary of Business & Decision on February 13 — just four days ago.

A few days ago at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, I attended a presentation from one of the major consulting companies. The topic: banking in 2020. I heard about big data, the need for real-time analysis of information (in particular from the Internet), and a few other trends. While many of these trends were not new, I could only agree that they would be important in the future, as they align with Forrester’s 2008 research on what banking will look like in the future. (If you are interested in details regarding Forrester’s research on this topic, please see “Financial Services Of The Future: Collaborative Competition Will Be The Norm” and “Banking IT In 2023 Updated,” keeping in mind that 2023 is a metaphor for a longer-term perspective.) However, there was one statement within the presentation that I seriously disagree with.

Just recently, I had an interesting customer experience — or, to be more precise, my daughter had it, as it involved her laptop computer from one of the top international Internet PC vendors. It was only a little defect — more an annoyance than a real fault. Since we bought “next business day service,” it should have gotten fixed right away. It played out differently in real life.