Not surprisingly, IBM announced plans to acquire Cognos today. Our immediate reactions:
- Although everyone is denying it, certainly feels responsive and "me too" to SAP/BOBJ and ORCL/HYSL.
- At $5B, it's the largest software acquisition by IBM, and in fact greater than IBM spent in 2006 on all 16 software acquisitions it did.
- IBM has been in the BI space for a long time, it'll be interesting to see if they can extend this into a broader Performance Management play, of which they have been late to the game. Also, watch what they do with SaaS and BI.
- While the big get bigger, we continue to see tremendous innovation around the BI stack, particularly with open source, i.e. Paris based Talend.
- MicroStrategy anyone?
Thoughts?
Any chance someone might convince Jim Goodnight to sell SAS?
Posted by: elcure | November 13, 2007 at 05:52 AM