EU signs off on IBM's Cognos acquisition
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InfoWorld - IBM's $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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IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) said Wednesday that it has sewn up outsourcing deals with two Danish companies valued at more than $1 billion over 10 years, reinforcing its strength in Europe.
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EU defense ministers will sign off today on plans to establish battle groups of troops poised for instant action in a significant move toward a European army.
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Business intelligence software maker Cognos Inc. said Monday that completed the acquisition of Frango, a Swedish manufacturer of consolidation and financial reporting software, for about $53.
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(InfoWorld) - Business performance software vendor CognosÂ has agreed to buy Applix, a developer of performance analysis software, and plans to integrate the companies' products by early next year. With TM1, Applix's 64-bit in-memory analytical engine, Cognos said it hopes to boost its software's ability to analyze and optimize complex financial performance data. Cognos and Applix expect to complete the $339 million cash transaction in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approvals. It will only take a modest effort to integrate Cognos 8 with TM1, Cognos CEO Rob Ashe said on Wednesday in a conference call with analysts. He expects to have an integrated version on sale in the first quarter of next year. Cognos has around 3,500 customers for its financial performance management software -- and almost 20,000 more for its other products, while Applix has around 3,000 customers. Between 25 percent and 30 percent of those are joint customers, Ashe said. Many of them are already asking Cognos to support the TM1 engine, he said. One of the attractions of the Applix acquisition was the company's focus, Ashe said. "We like everything Applix does: they live and breathe performance management," Both companies compete withÂ Hyperion, now owned by Oracle, with Business Objects, and in some areas with SAP, whichÂ acquired performance analytics vendor OutlookSoftÂ in May. In 2006, Cognos was the second largest vendor of corporate performance management software, ahead of Oracle and behind Hyperion, according to market estimates published last month by analysts at Gartner. Those rankings have changed with recent acquisitions, with Business Objects now claiming third place thanks to its purchase of Cartesis and ALG Software, while Oracle-Hyperion moves to the top.
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European Union regulators Thursday approved the takeover of Greek consumer electronics retailer Kotsovolos by the British chain Dixons PLC.
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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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IBM said Wednesday it is expanding its broad SOA (service-oriented architecture) portfolio with the acquisition of AptSoft, a maker of business event processing software.AptSoft&#39;s products will sit in IBM&#39;s WebSphere line. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Also known as complex event processing (CEP), business event processing is seen as a key technology driver for the next generation of SOA. The software analyzes vast amounts of system events in real time, searching for trends and anomalies -- &quot;complex events&quot; -- that may impact the business, and triggers a response process if one is found.For example, the technology could be used by an online gaming site to spot malfeasance among the torrent of transactions that occur each second, or by a trading firm to track minute changes in stock price activity among various markets, IBM said in a statement.IBM executives are planning to reveal more about the acquisition during a conference call Wednesday at 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time.Other companies in the CEP/BEP market include Tibco and Streanbase.
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BRUSSELS: A European Union court is set to rule this week on a $120 billion deal MCI-WorldCom made during the height of the go-go years that still resonates today.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Dagrofa, one of Denmark's largest providers of goods for the retail sector, today announced a 50 million Euro, 10-year strategic agreement for IBM to manage Nord Data's IT infrastructure and applications.
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Caixanova and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced details of a 10-year, 70 million euro information technology services agreement that will optimize the savings bank's IT platform and prevent data loss in the event of possible interruptions.
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IBM said Wednesday that it has sewn up outsourcing deals with two Danish companies valued at more than $1 billion over 10 years, reinforcing its strength in Europe.
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OTTAWA (CP) - Canadian business software maker Cognos Inc. is bidding to take over Frango AB, a Swedish specialist in financial reporting technology, for the equivalent of about $67.
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Eurocrats not quite as enthusiastic US negotiators in Brussels expect to reach agreement with the European Union within a week regarding cooperative use of the American Global Positioning System (GPS) and the EU's proposed Galileo sat-nav constellations.â¦
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IBM plans to acquire content-management software maker Venetica, the 18th acquisition that Big Blue&#39;s Software Group has made since 2001.
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After agreeing to sell its PC division to China's Lenovo Group, IBM now faces the task of keeping its corporate and government customers from abandoning its standard-setting brand.
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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.