Right on the heels of SAP and Business Objects is the IBM and Cognos announcement. Once again and like SAP, IBM didn’t need the capabilities. They are in all probability doing this to pick up market share and taking a major competitor off the market.
On November 12, 2007 IBM announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Cognos. Cognos is a recognized industry leader and one of the largest providers of business intelligence and performance management solutions, with more than 25,000 customers and over 3,000 partners. Together, IBM and Cognos will become the industry’s leading provider of technology and services for Business Intelligence and Performance Management.
The acquisition of Cognos extends IBM’s Information On Demand value proposition, providing the industry’s leading and most complete solutions for unlocking the business value of information, which will extend IBM’s ability to capitalize on emerging business growth opportunities, while IBM’s hardware, software and services capabilities and extensive global reach will accelerate delivery of Cognos solutions, enabling our customers to:
- maximize the value of their information
- optimize their business processes
- deliver trusted information in real-time
- achieve higher performance across the enterprise ((IBM press release, November 12, 2007. Retrieved from IBM.com on November 13, 2007.))
Yada, yada, yada. Again my opinionis the same as for the SAP/BO deal. The players in the BI space are now behemoths with fewer small and mid sized players that will find it increasingly difficult to compete. What I considered to be the top to vendors (Cognos and BO) are now taken off the table, and while the product sets may be maintained by SAP and IBM for some time, the sales and market realities will most certainly change.
