IBM has long looked to Novell to serve as a buffer to Red Hat's growing dominance.
Years ago, IBM invested $50 million in Novell. More recently, IBM selected Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise for its Cognos 8 mainframe debut. A Red Hat Enterprise Linux version is planned for the future.
The choice of Linux was easy: 20 percent of IBM's System z growth stems from Linux, and Linux is easier to develop. According to an article in SearchEnterpriseLinux.com:
Cognos was able to fast-track porting the application to System z because it was already available for IBM Systems p and x and because it's faster to make changes to open source code...
This won't offer Novell much of a lead over Red Hat, but it's a signal that Red Hat has real competition again.
Who do you want to buy from today? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, or SAP? Those are pretty much the only choices left, now that IBM has announced its acquisition of Cognos for $4.9 billion.
The deal has long been expected, given that IBM had to play catch-up with Oracle and SAP, both of whom have gone on the business intelligence buying binge in the past year. The Cognos acquisition should work financially for IBM by giving it economies of scale in the sales process.
But what does it give customers? One less choice. That is, unless they opt for open source, which opens up the playing field considerably. JasperSoft, Pentaho, Actuate, Greenplum, and others offer choice in business intelligence. It will be interesting to see if someone snaps one up at the "low-end" of the market.
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