01/22/2007

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN), a specialist in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced it has acquired privately held Celequest Corporation, a provider of operational business intelligence solutions based in Redwood City, California. The acquisition closed on January 16. Financial terms were not disclosed.

ebizQ received the following details:

“This is a great complementary acquisition for Cognos. Celequest’s innovation in self service dashboard creation and real-time information monitoring extends our vision for operational BI and enhances our market-leading performance management solution,” said Rob Rose, chief strategy officer at Cognos. “This gives us the opportunity to reach a new class of users who need to continuously monitor performance against key metrics and make decisions based on real-time, operational information. Celequest's operational dashboards are immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 BI, delivering a more complete view of enterprise information for better overall performance management.”

Celequest is the industry’s only dashboarding solution to be offered as an appliance or via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which allows for fast and low-cost deployment – a big advantage for departments or companies with limited staff and IT resources. Powered by patent-pending, in-memory streaming technology, users can monitor real-time feeds from transactional systems. Celequest is certified on AppExchange and can continuously monitor Salesforce data in a hosted environment. And w ith process or user-triggered alerts, operational managers in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, and retail can see the most relevant information at the time they need it most, easing their ability to manage day-to-day business activities relating to risk exposure, operational efficiency, or inventory control.

“Driving performance improvement requires timely and easy-to-use information for visibility across operations,” said Mark Smith, chief executive officer and executive vice president research at Ventana Research. “The acquisition of Celequest will provide Cognos with a complementary BI solution that delivers on the operational intelligence derived from business events across an enterprise.”

“We regard Cognos as the world leader in BI and performance management, and we are excited about joining the Cognos team,” said Diaz Nesamoney , chief executive officer at Celequest. “We see this as a great opportunity to further promote our vision of helping customers drive performance. We also are proud to introduce our customers to the value of a complete performance management system from Cognos."