Business - Written Monday, November 12, 2007 by Don Tapscott - 3 Comments

IBM, Cognos and Business Intelligence 2.0

So the big news today is that IBM has acquired Cognos for about $5 Billion. This is not a major surprise as last summer many articles (such as this one and this one) speculated about this exact thing happening, and rumors of this partnership have been swirling continously for quite some time. But while it may not be a total shocker, it’s worth thinking about how this acquisition is representative of one of the two big trends we are seeing in the business intelligence (BI) space – consolidation in traditional markets around ecosystems.

If you go back through the recent history, Oracle has bought Hyperion (and also nabbed Siebel analytics as part of the Siebel acquisition), Microsoft bought Proclarity and an assortment of smaller players, SAP bought Business Objects and some other small players, and now IBM has bought Cognos. Cognos represented the last traditional publicly traded independent (SAS is a slightly different story), and this trend will likely continue in other areas of the BI space as the ecosystem story evolves. Might Teradata be next?

A second trend we are seeing also partially drives the first one – many newly funded players that are emerging with a variety of widget/ gadget options, in-memory alternatives, advance predictive algorithms, and assorted other bells and whistles. Perhaps most importantly to many, the interfaces being provided by many of these new players are extremely user friendly and streamlined (think: the Google look), making BI far more valuable to ever more people. Continue…