Filing reveals that Cognos went to IBM first
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Cognos executives first approached IBM in the months leading up to&#160;IBM&#39;s pending $5 billion deal to buy the company, not the other way around, according to a document Cognos submitted Friday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.The filing was prepared for Cognos shareholders in advance of the Jan. 14 vote on the sale.The details it provides of the negotiations between IBM and the company stand in contrast to past statements made by Rob Ashe, the Canadian business-intelligence software maker&#39;s CEO, who at one time stressed the company&#39;s game plan was to become the top independent BI vendor in the market.But clearly, those ambitions weakened as the space saw a dramatic consolidation in 2007 with&#160;SAP scooping up Business Objects&#160;and&#160;Oracle buying Hyperion.In fact, Cognos talked with potential suitors as far back as the middle of last year, according to the filing. The vendor said a firm it identified only as &quot;Company X&quot; approached it about a possible acquisition on July 19, 2006, but those discussions eventually broke down, according to the filing, which does not reveal Company X&#39;s price-per-share offer.Negotiations ceased on Nov. 20, 2006, and Cognos subsequently reached out to IBM in December 2006 to gauge its interest, according to the filing. &quot;While our board of directors had not determined that a sale of Cognos was the most desirable outcome, it believed that IBM&#39;s interest was of relevance in considering any strategic alternative in the event that Company X or other potential acquirers approached us,&quot; it states.Company X attempted to restart talks with Cognos on Dec. 6 but refused to raise its offer, according to the filing.Ashe then met on Jan. 8 with Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM&#39;s information management division, and Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group.Cognos entered a confidentiality agreement with IBM on Jan. 31, and executives from the two companies met a second time on Feb. 2.Talks continued throughout the year but revolved around partnership opportunities until Sept. 21, when Goyal and David Johnson, IBM&#39;s vice president of corporate development, called Ashe &quot;on an unsolicited basis, and expressed IBM&#39;s interest in acquiring Cognos,&quot; the filing states.The two firms spent the next several weeks haggling over a price for Cognos. IBM&#39;s initial offer was $50 to $52 per common share in cash, but Cognos deemed it insufficient, according to the filingFollowing a series of back-and-forth negotiations, IBM raised its price to $57. Cognos did not accept, but said it would proceed based on a $58-per-share offer, the filing states.IBM agreed, and the firms eventually signed the deal on Nov. 11.A Cognos spokeswoman said Monday that the company would not comment on the filing. Shares of the company were trading at about $57 midday.
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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.
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Blue-chip stocks opened slightly lower  on Thursday, with rising energy prices feeding investor  concerns, but the Nasdaq index opened higher after software  company Cognos Inc. COGN.O posted better-than-expected  earnings.
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IBM on Friday is scheduled to make available early versions of three grid-based technologies intended to help corporate and third-party developers better manage grid-based resources as a way to solve large and compute-intensive problems.
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ENDICOTT, N.Y., June 15  /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In response to job cuts, job shifting to low cost countries and declining working conditions at IBM Corp.
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The Blue Gene/L system performed just over 36,000 billion calculations a second during tests at IBM&#39;s Rochester office in Minnesota, the company announced on 29 September.
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InfoWorld - Business performance software vendor Cognos&#160;has agreed to buy Applix, a developer of performance analysis software, and plans to integrate the companies&#39; products by early next year.
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(InfoWorld) - Having previously made major product announcements around data and information management, IBM focused on the third leg of that strategy, content management, on Tuesday, including the vendor's first major release of its acquired FileNet technology. A year ago,Â IBM announced it would invest an additional $1 billion in data management to focus on software and services to help customers better manage and gain insight from their data. The vendor followed that up with the launch of its Information Server software in October based on technology it gained through theÂ $1.1 billion purchase of Ascential in 2005. Now, it's content management's turn. FileNet P8 4.0 released Tuesday is the first major version of the ECM (enterprise content management) software sinceÂ IBM bought FileNet in October for $1.6 billion. The software allows users to capture, manage, access, and bring together content from across their operations, automating records management and making it easier for companies to meet compliance requirements. New in the release is a J2EE-based content engine and content federation services for third-party repositories so that a company can carry out functions including search, classification, storage, updating, and deletion of content held in data stores from a variety of different software vendors. Federation is vital because it's "impossible" that any enterprise would be able to store all its content in a single repository, Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, said during a conference call. Some enterprises currently have as many as 20 different content stores, he added. Franklin Alvarez, manager of computer applicationsÂ forÂ construction services, at utility company Consolidated Edison Company of New York, welcomed IBM's purchase of FileNet. His firm has been an IBM customer for more than 35 years and a FileNet user for more than 15 years. "We were very happy to see the two come together," he said. "It gives us real synergies to leverage." The utility begun deploying FileNet's P8 in late 2004 to automate a large amount of manual functions, particularly in the transfer of data back and forth between the company and outside agencies, such as the Department of Transportation. Alvarez's unit is responsible for the excavation work involved in laying new electricity cables or gas pipelines and in repairing existing systems in New York City --Â all tasks that require continual liaison with multiple New York agencies to obtain work permits. The utility is also keen to put more content, such as layouts of systems and compliance specifications, into the hands of its workforce while they're at excavation sites. Con Edison also uses the business process management piece of the ECM software to capture knowledge from its aging workforce, Alvarez said. "Our company is cradle to grave," he added. "It's not uncommon for someone to work here for 30 to 40 years." IBM also debuted a new Web 2.0 interface for its Content Manager OnDemand software so that users can access content held in all the vendor's ECM offerings via a Web browser. IBM's Mills wouldn't comment on whether the vendor is likely to make more ECM acquisitions. In general, he expects IBM to continue on its current run-rate of acquiring around a dozen companies annually. In the wake of a recent flurry of announcements from pureplay ECM players targeting the midmarket, IBM will continue to look at how best to serve the content management needs of midsize companies. "We're already reaching into the middle and have some skinnyed-down products," Mills said. Â
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With consolidation at a fever pitch in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, it would be understandable if MicroStrategy customers felt nervous, given that the vendor remains as one of the market&#39;s few independents.After all,&#160;Business Objects now has the support of new parent company SAP, thanks to a $6.7 billion acquisition, while&#160;Hyperion is now part of Oracle, which spent $3.3 billion to buy it. Meanwhile,&#160;IBM is expected to soon finalize its $5 billion purchase of Cognos.Yet, MicroStrategy customers interviewed at the company&#39;s MicroStrategy World 2008 conference in Miami expressed confidence in the vendor and said its independent status gives it certain advantages over Business Objects, SAP, and Cognos.In particular, several customers said they like that MicroStrategy will remain free of pressures stemming from having to prioritize supporting complementary products from a parent company and, conversely, diluting support for similar products from competing companies.Lindsey Aubuchon, MIS director at W.E. Aubuchon, which operates hardware stores in New England, said her company likes to have flexibility to mix and match IT products as it sees fit, creating multi-vendor environments to achieve its desired implementations. &quot;My company likes to have openness to choose what they want,&quot; said Aubuchon, whose employer has been a MicroStrategy customer for about seven years.Consequently, she nodded in agreement when MicroStrategy&#39;s CEO Michael Saylor said in his keynote at the event that the vendor strives to be agnostic and neutral with respect to making its products work with complementary wares from other vendors.&quot;Our view is to be Switzerland in this business, and to make sure we protect your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors and technology architectures to achieve your goal,&quot; Saylor said.He predicted that Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion will see their product roadmaps re-routed based on competitive considerations handed down by their new parent companies.As an independent, MicroStrategy will continue to support a wide variety of complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems, processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers and on market dynamics, Saylor said. &quot;The market needs a vendor that provides the flexibility we can provide,&quot; he said.Phillip Julian, sales operations and senior data management analyst at Inspire Pharmaceuticals in Durham, North Carolina, is all for product agnosticism and flexibility in IT vendors. The company recently acquired the MicroStrategy software to generate better, more interactive and visually appealing reports, he said. Until now, Inspire had been analyzing data with SAS Institute data-mining software and creating reports with Microsoft&#39;s Excel.&quot;We&#39;re doing it so we get into really good technology that would help us grow,&quot; Julian said. &quot;I want to move us into another generation [of reporting software] where we&#39;re looking at something that&#39;s more graphical, more visual. We need to have something that the VP of sales and the sales force can understand.&quot;Similar expectations led Robeks, a chain of fruit juice establishments, to make a hefty investment in the MicroStrategy platform, which it is in the process of implementing. With most of its presence in the U.S. West Coast, Manhattan Beach, California-based Robeks is looking to grow significantly in other parts of the U.S. and the world in the coming years, and, to support those efforts, it needs better reporting and analysis tools than the in-house ones it currently uses.&quot;Being able to analyze [sales and marketing] data more accurately will help us grow the business. We&#39;re in a very quick growth mode right now,&quot; said IS Director Pete Carvajal.As a new customer, he was interested in hearing Saylor address the recent wave of market consolidation to find out what MicroStrategy&#39;s position is. &quot;Them emphasizing that they&#39;re one of the players in the market that&#39;s not in the middle of all the turmoil of all the consolidation was good to hear and to understand what the future is,&quot; he said.&quot;It&#39;s important for them to come out and indicate the whys and whens of their business model moving forward. This is a huge investment for my company, and the last thing I want to do is spend all this time and money in an application that gets absorbed by a bigger company and maybe disappears,&quot; Carvajal said.
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NEW YORK - IBM Corp. said Friday that it has settled part of an employee lawsuit claiming that the world&#39;s biggest seller of computers and related services violated age-discrimination rules when it changed pension plans.
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In response to the latest external reporting requirements from the Feds, Cognos announced this week three additions to its suite of financial applications targeted at the enterprise office of finance.
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IBM's personal computer division racked up $965 million in losses between Jan. 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004, the company said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus reported the first profit since its birth in 1999 thanks to cost cuts, rising metals prices and strong demand, notably from China.
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OCTOBER 13, 2004  - Borland Software Corp. and IBM announced upgrades to their development tools this week designed to support heterogeneous environments and more closely link software creation to business goals.
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Cognos Inc. is preparing to unplug its  business analysis software from the desktop PC and make it  mobile, with plans for its first launch on BlackBerry devices  in early 2007.
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OCTOBER 18, 2004  - IBM and Borland Software Corp. last week separately brought out upgrades to their development tool lines that executives said add support for heterogeneous environments and
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Cognos has rebranded the financial performance management software it gained through the acquisition of Applix earlier this year and provided a road map for the product line Tuesday.