IBM to acquire Cognos for $5 billion
IBM on Monday announced plans to buy business intelligence software company Cognos in a $5 billion all-cash transaction.
The acquisition, which was rumored for several months, continues IBM's strategy of acquiring companies to fill out its software portfolio and boost earnings growth.
Cognos, a public company based in Ottawa, Canada, provides tools for building business reports and business performance management dashboards.
The software will complement IBM's existing set of products for data warehousing and information management.
Cognos' existing products will "match nicely with (IBM's) middleware and software products," Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software Group, said during a conference call Monday.
Mills said Cognos' employees and management staff will remain in Ottawa. The companies would not comment on whether layoffs were planned as a result of the deal.
Cognos CEO Rob Ashe
Cognos President and CEO Rob Ashe would not comment on whether other companies bid for Cognos. He said the company was not for sale before this deal developed, however.
Ashe said there is virtually "no product overlap" between the two companies' product lineups.
This marks the 23rd acquisition IBM has made to further its "information on demand" strategy. The transaction, which works out to $58 per Cognos share, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2008 and provide shareholders a net value of $4.9 billion, IBM said.
The move accelerates consolidation that has already begun in the business intelligence area.
After a number of standalone business intelligence companies combined a few years ago, Oracle bought Hyperion for $3.3 billion earlier this year. And last month, SAP announced plans to acquire Cognos' archrival, Business Objects, in a deal valued at more than $6.8 billion.
A lot of money is at stake in the business intelligence market. AMR Research, for example, expects spending in the business intelligence and performance-management arena to reach $23.8 billion by the end of the year, reaching a level that would jump ahead over last year by 3.6 percent.
Cognos will become a group within IBM's Software division headed by Ashe.
Update: 10:26 a.m.: Analysts note that there a number of players in the business-intelligence market, but the IBM-Cognos announcement marks an end to the "big three."
"After the SAP-Business Objects announcement, Cognos sent a message to the analyst community that 'we are the last man standing, woo hoo.' It had a sound of desperation that the (SAP-Business Objects merger would be) a good thing for us," said Lee Geishecker, enterprise strategies vice president for AMR Research.
The consolidating industry may have little effect on customers, Geishecker noted.
"The majority of customers have a mix of solutions. Some may own Business Objects and Hyperion," Geishecker said. "So the mergers don't make their integration any easier; it just changes who they make the check out to."
Meanwhile, a number of the smaller business intelligence companies may seek to merge with companies that are similar in size, or smaller, to build up their critical mass. Geishecker, however, noted that a number of these smaller companies are niche players, and their ability to merge with others will depend on their product and customer mix.
Shares of Cognos rose 7.91 percent in morning trading to $57.17 a share. And IBM also received a lift of 3.09 percent to $103.35 a share. Shares of both companies rose on a morning when the broader markets were mixed.
News.com's Mike Ricciuti and Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
As an SOA designer, I dislike repeatedly centering solutions around the products of a single vendor (or a small number of vendors), unless it is because that vendor offers the best solution. I was not thrilled by the purchase of Rational.
A suite of solutions from a single vendor can have a synergous effect. But ultimately, as alternatives disappear, I have less ability to find innovative and superior solutions.
"It is the 23rd acquisition IBM has made to further its "information on demand" strategy. " - scary.
Just Get "Warped" And You May See The Light Too!
Re: "CAIB to look at expanding shared data base"
"When the Caribbean Association of Indigenous Banks (CAIB) holds its 34th annual general meeting in Guyana next week, commercial bankers will examine a number of important topics including the need to unify and harmonise banking rules across the region especially in countries participating in the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).
One proposal on the table is to have banks in countries that are not interlinked to the communication infrastructure of banks in other countries share a common data base that would allow them to keep track of the history of customers applying for loans and doing business with banks in other jurisdictions in general.
Banks in Trinidad and Barbados, for example already share information on customers while those in the Eastern Caribbean also have shared systems.
The meeting which starts with a ceremonial opening at the Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel on Monday night, ?will take an in-depth look at commercial banks which currently are not part of the shared data base,? said Enid Bissember, Senior Projects Officer at the CARICOM Secretariat and a member of the Local Organising Committee of the CAIB.
"We are going to examine the challenges of doing business in a single commercial space now that we have the CSME, whether we need to have a more collaborative rather than individual approach to banking, whether there will be need for mergers and acquisitions to survive in the single space or what forms of strategic alliances are necessary to continue operating successfully," Mrs. Bissember said as preparations heighten for the Conference.
A fully shared system will also give banks access to data of credit unions and micro lending agencies as a means of minimising defaults on loans among other benefits.
The plenary sessions of the Conference will be held at the Guyana International Convention Centre at Turkeyen on the East Coast of Demerara on Tuesday and Wednesday. President Bharrat Jagdeo, CARICOM Secretary General Dr. Edwin Carrington, LOC Chairperson Mr. John Tracey and Guyana Central Bank Governor Lawrence Williams are scheduled to address the opening ceremony. More than 150 delegates are expected to attend.
The bankers will also sample Guyana's tourism product on a day trip along the historic colonial sites in the Essequibo and Mazaruni rivers on Thursday November 15th.
Guyana last hosted the Conference in 1998. The banks have a combined asset base of US$17.5B, 50 members and three honorary members- the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), CARICOM and the Caribbean Centre for Monetary Studies."
Now, Now, "All Your Base (Business Intelligence) Are Belong To Us"
http://www.iadb.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFqjI3gyAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU
You Go At "Warp" Speed "Steve Mills". Wow!
But the one thing I don't see in your comment is WHY Cognos has to be owned by IBM, in order for you to progress your solution.
Is it that you have greater confidence in IBM? If so, perhaps there needs to be (already is?) a review process, to enable business to pass on experience of their various vendors - a kind of software vendor BBB (Better Business Bureau).
- Cognos is worthless
- by scdecade November 12, 2007 8:13 AM PST
- MS can eaily add enough funtionality to Office to doom Cognos. If you've got Software Assurance and you run SQL Server you already have absolutely no use for Cognos. There're only 2 BI vendors that'll hold their value. SAS and SPSS. Only one of them is a public company. IBM's only hope with this acquisition is to somehow entwine Cognos with their OpenOffice offering. That's the slow, expensive, and difficult road but it's the only one that doesn't lead to a deadend.
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- Look what "scdecade" is talking about - Office!
- by Commander_Spock November 12, 2007 8:40 AM PST
- "scdecade" in this post has stated inter alia: "MS can easily add enough functionality to Office to doom Cognos" (do not mind the corrections). As the whole world knows, Office is proprietary product... and, the proposed OOXML Standards Format are yet to emerge as an approved International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO); whereas, as this CNET NEWS article has stated clearly Cognos is built on Open Standards; and, its "functionalities" will evolve (along with those of "OpenOffice", IBM's Lotus Notes, IBM's Lotus Symphony...) to meet and beat any competitive threat from Office - so there!
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- You obviously...
- by nyabdns November 12, 2007 11:59 AM PST
- have never used Cognos. M$ reporting services, which is the closest thing M$ has to anything Cognos offers, doesn't even come close to what Cognos can do.
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