IBM offers $5B for Cognos

November 13, 2007 from CBR – “The deal, valued at $5bn, or roughly $58 per share, would absorb the last-remaining top tier BI (Business Intelligence) pure play vendor still standing...

With the field's top three vendors (Business Objects, Hyperion, and now Cognos) sold off, players in what's left of the independent BI market are pointing to opportunities and omissions now that the usual suspects are off the map.”

180 View – ERP systems have been characterized as data rich and information poor. By including BI in ERP (which partly explains the acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle and Business Objects by SAP), organizations should not need to customize their systems to extract or slice and dice their ERP data. Although IBM does not sell ERP systems, they do have big opportunities with Cognos. A portion of IBM's existing clients will be interested in Cognos, and IBM can also offer their services to Cognos customers. As well, Cognos will be used by some of the customers of the ERP vendors including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. As IBM does not compete in the ERP space, IBM could be recommended by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft… for Cognos implementations as IBM is not an ERP competitor.