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« Who's What: Among BI Vendors | Main | A Lot of Unstructured Data Out There » November 12, 2007IBM to Acquire Cognos: What's the Deal With That?
The whale swallows the biggest fish. Billions of dollars flow. In September, Cognos made big news in the BI-data management world when it acquired Applix. Now, Cognos itself is about to be ingested by Big Blue. Is this a dynamic, consolidating, paradigm-shifting, evoluting, revoluting market, or what?! Some details: IBM and Cognos today announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Cognos for approximately $5 billion. (The acquisition, of course, is subject to Cognos shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.) Lately, the trend for big infrastructure vendors has been to grab a BI company to add business intelligence to their portfolios. Oracle has Hyperion, SAP has Business Objects, and now IBM has Cognos. A remaining BI company that has not been reeled in is SAS. IBM said it has already made 23 major acquisitions to build its "Information on Demand" initiative. Acquired players include Princeton Softech (data archiving and compliance), FileNet (enterprise content management), Ascential Software (information integration), DataMirror (changed data capture), SRD (entity analytics), Trigo (product information management), DWL (customer information management) and Alphablox (analytics). What do IBM and Cognos get out of the deal? IBM said the Cognos acquisition would help it reach further into CFOs’ offices with financial planning tools. The acquisition will also provide a broader reach for Cognos solutions across multiple industries and geographies with a more complete set of offerings, including consulting services, hardware, and other middleware software. Following completion of the acquisition, IBM intends to integrate Cognos as a group within IBM's Information Management Software division, focused on Business Intelligence and Performance Management. IBM also will appoint current Cognos President and CEO, Rob Ashe, to lead the group. In other words, bye bye, Cognos, it's been real nice. More information on IBM's acquisition of Cognos is available on IBM's investor Website. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
