Cognos, is to be acquired by I.B.M. for $4.9 billion. The takeover of Cognos, which is based in Ottawa, followed last month’s acquisition of the French company Business Objects, another maker of business intelligence software, by SAP of Germany for $6.8 billion. In March, Oracle bought Hyperion, another competitor of Cognos.
Software that sifts through data to tease out things like a customer’s buying habits or a corporation’s inefficiencies is hardly new. Cognos itself was founded in 1969. Cognos 8 BI, which was launched in September 2005, combines the features of several previous products: ReportNet, PowerPlay, Metrics Manager, Noticecast, and Data Manager (formerly Decision Stream).
Cognos 8 BI has won numerous awards including the eWEEK Excellence Award in Analytics and Reporting, the LOTUS ADVISOR “Editor’s Choice” Award, and TechTarget’s SearchCRM.com 2005 Product of the Year. In 2007, Cognos was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers, as published in Maclean’s magazine, one of only a handful of software development companies to receive this honor.
But many analysts anticipate that the business intelligence software market is about to enter a period of significant demand from companies and government agencies. ‘I.B.M. had nothing in this area,’ said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner, a technology consulting firm. ‘I.B.M. had to do something. But because it didn’t move fast enough, it paid a premium.’
