Microsoft is entering your market. Microsoft has swallowed many an industry over the years but has nurtured and grown others.
Data mining is next.
On May 25 Microsoft announced an initiative to extend OLE DB data access interfaces for data mining. The project is a joint effort between the Microsoft SQL Server development group and a Microsoft Research group headed by Usama Fayyad. OLE DB is a specification for a set of data access interfaces designed to enable heterogeneous databases to work seamlessly together. OLE DB for Data Mining will be a set of database-oriented functions to support data mining operations. A small group of data mining vendors was selected by Microsoft to evaluate the preliminary specification several months ago.