« MuleSource ESB 'Forges' New Open Source Environment | Main | Dave Linthicum Interviews SOA Visionaries »

I recently met with Don Campbell, vice president for product innovation and technology at Cognos, a preeminent performance management and businesss intelligence provider to the world's most well-known companies. If you ever bought a book on Amazon, ate a Hershey Bar or put Heinz Ketchup on your hot dog, be aware that Cognos does their BI, and excellent products aside, good business intelligence tools add to their success in the marketplace.

Don is one of those extra-cool "idea guys," who spoke earnestly and intelligently about the opportunities abounding in the analytics and dashboards business with the addition of Web 2.0 technologies such as enterprise search.

Today, Cognos announces its acquisition of Applix for $339 million. Cognos is presumedly buying Applix for its financial performance management tools.

Applix has been discussed as an acquisition target by a number of companies in the past year. Here's a description:

Applix is recognized as a leader in the financial analytics market. The company and its global network of partners help more than 3,000 customers worldwide manage their business analytics needs. Customers range across a broad variety of industries including insurance, financial services, banking, healthcare, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, manufacturing, consumer goods and retail. Incorporated in 1983, Applix has been publicly traded since 1994. Applix has also been recognized by numerous industry and analyst groups for being a technical and strategic leader in the marketplace, including being positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of Gartner's CPM Magic Quadrant.

To give others a chance to air their thoughts, Bill Hewitt, Kalido's CEO, says the following: "This is a good move for Cognos as they recognize the need for more high performance analytics - but the fact remains that most BI vendors continue to struggle to get the data to the front end, leaving users with inconsistent, stale or worse, invalid data on which to base their business decisions."

Posted by elizabeth in M&A |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2281