Cognos Bids For Swedish Software Vendor
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It&#39;s willing to pay more than $52 million in cash for Frango, a developer of financial-consolidation and reporting software. By Rick Whiting.
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Cognos on Tuesday unveiled the third release of its Cognos 8 BI tools, which have been updated to provide more targeted performance management information to a broader set of users.Cognos, whose shareholders voted Monday to approve IBM&#39;s proposal to buy the Ottawa-based BI vendor for US$5 billion, said that Cognos 8 v3 includes new features that can help enterprise and mid-sized companies analyze transactional data from ERP systems to help front-line workers and executive make better decisions.The updated software includes a self-service reporting interface to help finance and business analysts better access financial and operational data sources and create financial statement-style reports.For business groups, the updated tool set now allows users to create and manage their own perspectives of performance information by creating new OLAP cubes with consistent information from company-wide enterprise BI tools, Cognos said. Business analysts, for example, can now build smaller, faster data sets of very specific business performance information for more targeted exploration.A new Cognos BI portal-based dashboard lets business users and executives access all of the strategic management and scorecard information of their company in one view, the company added.Finally, the software includes a feature called Briefing Books, which allows IT administrators to more easily respond to requests from senior management for a comprehensive view of performance information. Cognos said Briefing Books provides a way for executives to easily navigate multi-page reports with business data.Other new features for administrators include:-- Support services to help reduce the time required to build data models;-- Tools to create a snapshot view of system health to give administrators a single, consolidated view of the status of an entire system; and-- The ability to view multiple system metrics and set thresholds to monitor them.&quot;The broad system management advances we&#39;ve tested in Cognos&#39; enterprise platform help us speed development and overall productivity to achieve and exceed service commitments,&quot; said Thomas Haag, project manage of data warehousing and business intelligence at Lufthansa, in a statement. &quot;The administrative enhancements let our operations team proactively monitor the overall system health in real time, easing repetitive questions and speeding decisions, on peak usage days in particular.&quot;Cognos 8 v3 is now available.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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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;
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IBM Corp. on Thursday won EU approval for its largest acquisition ever, the $5 billion cash purchase of "business intelligence" specialist Cognos Inc.
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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.
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Cognos Inc. unveiled a new version of its flagship BI line just a day after shareholders voted to approve its $5 billion sale to IBM.
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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
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Deal will merge antivirus vendor with maker of backup and archiving software.
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US software giant Microsoft said on Tuesday it would offer to buy the Norwegian Internet search company Fast Search and Transfer for 1.2 billion dollars (836 million euros).
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Germany's MAN AG is preparing a more   attractive offer for Sweden's Scania SCVb.ST, the Wall Street   Journal on Friday quoted MAN MANG.DE Chief Executive Hakan   Samuelsson as saying.
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Veritas Software is to acquire email archiving firm KVault Software (KVS) to bolster its utility computing abilities. The traditional storage management giant will pay $225m for KVS, which will be operate
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IBM's US$5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.
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Microsoft has offered to buy enterprise search software company Fast Search And Transfer for 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.2 billion), it said Tuesday.The acquisition will bring Microsoft powerful high-end search technologies to complement its enterprise infrastructure offering, the company said.Microsoft&#39;s recent efforts in the enterprise search market have been aimed at the other end of the market. In November, It introduced two new low-end enterprise search products,&#160;Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008, both based on its SharePoint Server 2007 business productivity platform. It is pitching&#160;Search Server 2008&#160;as a cheap entry into enterprise search, while the Express version is free for single installations.By integrating Fast Search&#39;s products with SharePoint, and drawing on its worldwide network of partners, Microsoft hopes to bring Fast Search&#39;s products to a wider audience, it said Tuesday.It is also counting on Fast Search&#39;s Norwegian research team to bolster its research efforts in Europe. Microsoft has laboratories in Cambridge, England, and in Copenhagen, Denmark.The directors of Fast Search, based in Oslo, have recommended that shareholders accept the offer, which represents a premium of 42 percent over Fast Search&#39;s share price at close of business on Friday. The companies expect the deal to close in the second quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, including the approval of the holders of at least 90 percent of Fast Search&#39;s shares.Fast Search&#39;s rivals in the market for specialized enterprise search tools include Google, with its Search Appliance; French search company Exalead, and Autonomy, which recently acquired Meridio and Zantaz.Representatives of Fast Search could not immediately be reached for comment.&#160;
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Microsoft has offered to buy enterprise search software company Fast Search And Transfer for 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.2 billion), it said Tuesday.
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In the midst of tough international competition, Swedish technology companies Incordia and Apptus were the winners in a deal to build CDON's new e-commerce site. In so doing, CDON has given themselves the opportunity for continued expansion and increased profits.
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Cognos said Monday that its Cognos 8 Go! Mobile business intelligence software now supports Windows Mobile 6 smartphones, as well as Nokia E- and N-series devices running S60 Third Edition on Symbian OS.The software works with Cognos&#39; core BI platform and can automatically reformat reports for various types of devices.The Canadian firm had&#160;already developed support for Research in Motion&#39;s BlackBerry&#160;smartphones.Cognos&#39; move to support more mobile platforms is logical, according to David O&#39;Connell, senior analyst with Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Mass.&quot;They&#39;re going mobile. They&#39;ve been doing it for a while,&quot; O&#39;Connell said. &quot;Basically, the more platforms you can put BI on, the more people you have adopting it, so there&#39;s more ROI.&quot;Anastasia Valentine, product manager for Cognos, said the firm made the new clients in response to market interest. Customer interest in Windows Mobile 6 centered in the United States and the Asian-Pacific region, while European customers desired support for Nokia devices, she said.While the new products are fine-tuned for each platform, they are identical feature-wise to the BlackBerry client, according to Valentine.Support for one of this year&#39;s hottest mobile devices, Apple&#39;s iPhone, isn&#39;t yet on Cognos&#39; docket.Despite the iPhone&#39;s explosive popularity, its immediate value to enterprises has been questioned. Forrester Research recently issued a report listing reasons why IT departments shouldn&#39;t support it, at least for now. Those warnings include the device&#39;s lack of support for push e-mail and its cost, Forrester said.Valentine said Cognos isn&#39;t seeing much customer demand for iPhone support, adding that the company is also keeping an eye on Google&#39;s Android mobile development platform.A &quot;starter pack&quot; for Cognos&#39; mobile BI software, which includes a server-based license, licenses for 25 users and one year of support, costs $31,000, Valentine said.
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European regulators have approved IBM's planned $5 billion acquisition of BI software maker Cognos, saying it would not raise competition concerns.