IBM makes good on its Cognos buyout with 16 new products
446988
Last November, we wondered what IBM expects to come out of its acquisition of Canadian business intelligence software provider Cognos. This morning we found out, as Big Blue enters the "business optimization" business.
741756
IBM announced the first results of its recently closed&#160;acquisition of business intelligence vendor Cognos, unveiling an array of product offerings and services that tie into its Information on Demand strategy.&quot;We are off and running,&quot; said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM&#39;s software group, during a press conference on Wednesday.IBM&#39;s long-standing partnership with Cognos allowed it to quickly pull together the new products, Mills said. They include a Cognos 8 BI &quot;starter pack&quot; for IBM&#39;s InfoSphere Warehouse; integration of Cognos 8 with IBM&#39;s Information Server data integration platform; templates for linking Cognos 8 with IBM&#39;s BPM (business process management) software, Filenet; and Dashboard Accelerator, for quickly constructing dashboards with Cognos 8, according to a statement.The company also plans to bundle Cognos 8 with its C-Class Balanced Warehouse products, which are aimed at small to medium-sized firms; and has created Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control, which combines a variety of content management and archiving capabilities with IBM storage hardware, as well as compliance monitoring through Cognos&#39; technology, a statement said.Along with the product offerings, IBM announced a number of offerings tailored for verticals and a set of new services.The basic contention of IBM&#39;s IOD push is that future market opportunities lie less in packaged applications, than in optimizing those applications&#39; performance through data management, delivery and analysis.&quot;When we ask customers if they have an information agenda, we get inconsistent answers,&quot; said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of information management. &quot;That&#39;s where the real growth is.&quot;Meanwhile, though, rival vendors like SAP and Oracle can align business intelligence with their widely used ERP (enterprise resource planning) offerings. IBM, which doesn&#39;t have an equivalent ERP product, is hardly at a disadvantage, Mills argued. &quot;A typical large company is running 2,000 to 4,000 applications. The brand names are a scatter-gram. Even companies who use a lot of SAP,&quot; he said.Though IBM is building out a sprawling stack of information-related technologies, the company will ensure customers who want even a single tool will be satisfied, Goyal asserted: &quot;We are based on a flexible architecture. You&#39;ll see from us that we&#39;re trying to meet customers in the way they buy.&quot;Enterprise customers suggested Wednesday that their own plans and needs fit into IBM&#39;s strategy.Paul Valle, senior vice president of information technology and CIO at the Papa Gino&#39;s/D&#39;Angelo&#39;s restaurant chain, said his firm has been using Cognos to improve its delivery business by identifying &quot;hot spots&quot; where performance is lagging.But the company now wants to take this a step further, he said: &quot;It&#39;s more than the negative areas, it&#39;s finding the positive areas and pulling it all together. That can only lead to customer satisfaction.&quot;Carl Try, manager of e-commerce and advanced technologies for Fiskars, which makes a range of consumer products, including tools, said the company has been using Cognos to derive meaning from its ERP application data. &quot;Our ERP strategy was really more North America. Now our C-level people want to pull global information,&quot; he said.Fiskars&#39; ultimate goal is not just to collect information from more sources, but to apply even more advanced analytics, he said: &quot;Just imagine, point-of-sale [data] combined with weather information. That&#39;s where we want to go.&quot;IBM&#39;s research work in applied mathematics will result in industry-leading analytics down the road, according to Mills. &quot;You now have all the visualization capability from Cognos, and we will now start to link these things up. ...We see this as a really unique differentiation that IBM is going to bring to the marketplace that quite frankly, no one else is going to be able to match.&quot;The executives declined to name specific figures when asked about the growth Cognos could spark. &quot;When you spend $5 billion, you have high expectations,&quot; Mills said. &quot;With 60 acquisitions under our belt we understand very clearly how to do this. ... we have every confidence we&#39;ll continue that with Cognos.&quot;
642902
IBM's sale of its PC unit to a Chinese firm is the latest sign that a new giant is rising.
341479
IBM on Monday launched a new, cheaper line of computer servers designed for smaller businesses, with production at the plant here.
667661
OTTAWA (CP) - Business software firm Cognos Inc. is offering $52.2 million US for Frango, a Stockholm-based company specializing in financial reporting.
374887
InfoWorld - IBM shored up commitment to its mainframe computing platform Thursday with a series of new technologies, investments in emerging markets, new industry-focused solutions, and new partnerships.
703939
Cognos' flagship product, ReportNet, is continuing to drive significant growth.
350326
Key investments are starting to pay off for the enterprise software operator.
270181
Business-software maker Cognos will buy Swedish financial-reporting software company Frango for $52.2 million. Cognos says the acquisition will strengthen its portfolio of corporate performance
256299
(InfoWorld) - French software maker Business Objects released the first of three new versions of its business intelligence software tailored for small to medium-size companies, a market area poised for growth, the company said Monday. The product, Standard Edition, is cheaper than the company's enterprise product and designed for those new to business intelligence (BI) applications, adding setup wizards and online tutorials, said Todd Rowe, a vice president and general manager for the company's midmarket division. Standard Edition includes features drawn from the company's enterprise product, such as dashboards, ad hoc reporting and integration with Microsoft's Office applications, but consolidates what were separate modules into a simplified package, Rowe said. Business Objects was losing out on sales to midmarket businesses -- which can range from 100 to 1,000 employees -- because its enterprise product was too expensive for their budgets, Rowe said. Business Objects competes with CognosÂ and Hyperion SolutionsÂ at both enterprise and midmarket levels. The midmarket sector, however, is the most profitable as well as the fastest growing area, Rowe said. It comprises about 35 percent of the $5.9 billion BI market, growing at 12.5 percent annually, according to the company's projections and data from Crimson Consulting Group. Business Objects is hailing Monday's release as its most aggressive in two years, with Standard Edition launching in 62 countries in 12 languages, Rowe said. By June, Business Objects will release Professional Edition, which adds data integration capabilities. By the end of year, the Premium Edition will include scorecards, metrics and goals, which will allow businesses to do forward planning. That release will come before the end of the year. All editions include integration with Crystal Reports, the company's software for formulating data and delivering reports through a Web browser. Standard Edition is sold as a perpetual license, Rowe said. Pricing starts at $20,000 for five concurrent users.
667017
IBM has beefed up its popular BladeCenter offering with the introduction of six new models and improved power management features.
382442
Software developer Cognos Inc. on Wednesday posted a 52 percent rise in second-quarter profit, topping Wall Street expectations on a surge in license revenue across all of its regions, the company said.
390050
European regulators have approved IBM's planned $5 billion acquisition of BI software maker Cognos, saying it would not raise competition concerns.
280052
IBM boosted its software portfolio for small and medium-size businesses with plans announced Friday to acquire Net Integration Technologies, a software vendor in Markham, Canada.Net Integration Technologies, which offers business management tools, will become part of IBM&#39;s Lotus division when the deal closes, which is expected to occur this quarter. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.&quot;We plan to use the technology to go after Microsoft in the small business server market,&quot; said Michael Rhodin, general manager at IBM&#39;s Lotus Software division during a conference call about the acquisition. IBM could use the technology to compete with Microsoft&#39;s Windows Small Business Server, which provides collaboration, e-mail, and communication tools.Founded in 1997, Net Integration Technologies&#39; tools include NitixBlue server software, which the company offers bundled with IBM Lotus Notes client software. The company also builds custom hardware and the Nitix Operating System, which is based on Linux and bundles system management, networking, security, and storage services.When Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995, it was a great channel company in touch with SMBs, Rhodin said. &quot;Somewhere along the lines, we lost touch with the roots,&quot; he said.The Net Integration Technologies acquisition is also in line with IBM&#39;s process of realigning operations to better define and serve customers. The company recently restructured sales operations and is lining up offerings to match those changes, Rhodin said.IBM did not comment on any potential layoffs or relocation of Net Integration Technologies employees.
389975
Cognos Inc., the largest Canadian software maker, offered to buy Sweden&#39;s Frango AB for 390.8 million kronor ($51.7 million) to expand in corporate performance management software.
699079
IBM has bought XIV, an Israeli manufacturer of SAN (storage area network) equipment. XIV&#39;s main product is Nextra, a storage system based on a grid of standard hardware components.
374857
InfoWorld - On Tuesday, Cognos unveiled Cognos 8 BI v3, most likely the last upgrade before the acquisition by IBM is final. The Cognos board ratified the acquisition earlier this week.