Cognos será azul

EbizQ informa que IBM se propone comprar Cognos, una de las últimas grandes empresas dedicadas a Business Intelligence, por un precio aproximado de 4.900 millones de dólares. Luego de Hyperion y Business Objects, casi todos los competidores del negocio pasan a ser parte de grandes operadores corporativos: Oracle, SAP, IBM. La noticia en EbizQ:

Today IBM announced its intention to acquire Cognos in an all-cash transaction at a price of approximately $5 billion USD or $58 USD per share, with a net transaction value of $4.9 billion USD. The acquisition is subject to Cognos shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.
Steve Mills introduced the analyst briefing by talking about the state of the market, with companies becoming more sophisticated about leveraging information, and using analytics for both looking back, and looking forward, becoming more pre-emptive in their decision making. He also spoke about how real-time business analytics was becoming an important part of business process management.
Just about every analyst on the call would have to agree with those statements. Last June, in the ebizQ BI in Action virtual conference this was discussed extensively both in the panel session and in a series of pre-conference podcasts. Indeed, one of the analysts questions was that we’ve been expecting this for a while, why now (answer – a $5 billion purchase takes time).
Cognos fits very well into the IBM stack. For a change it pretty much adds new functionality without adding a lot of redundancy. Furthermore, about 5 years ago Cognos re-architected their solution as a service based offering. It runs on top of IBM (and other) infrastructure software, providing real-time business intelligence and business performance management. The business performance management capabilities are key It enables companies to align, monitor and measure business operations with business strategies. This is truly good stuff – very important to business managers.

Como refiere el artículo de Beth Gold-Bernstein, la visión de IBM es muy optimista:

"Customers are demanding complete solutions, not piece parts, to enable real-time decision making," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "IBM has been providing Business Intelligence solutions for decades. Our broad set of capabilities – from data warehousing to information integration and analytics – together with Cognos, position us well for the changing Business Intelligence and Performance Management industry. We chose Cognos because of its industry-leading technology that is based on open standards, which complements IBM's Service Oriented Architecture strategy."
(...) “This is an exciting combination for our customers, partners, and employees. It provides us with the ability to expand our vision as the leading BI and Performance Management provider,” said Rob Ashe, president and chief executive officer, Cognos. “IBM is a perfect complement to our strategy, with minimal overlap in products, a broad range of technology synergies, and the resources, reach, and world-class services to accelerate this vision. Furthermore, this combination allows Cognos customers to leverage a broader set of solutions from IBM to advance their information management driven initiatives.”

Me olvido de alguna? Sólo queda Informatica Corporation, entre las grandes. El negocio de ERP e inteligencia de negocios cada vez más concentrado.