Cognos Off The Table

Bringing an end to the speculation on who would buy Cognos, IBM has announced that it will pay $5 Billion in cash to buy the Business Intelligence leader. Earlier, SAP bought Business Objects. Cognos is IBM’s 27th acquisition since 2006.

Business Intelligence is a hot space right now, which we have been covering in a fair bit of detail. Aberdeen Group analyst David hatch has written a number of pieces on the topic, highlighting the major trends:

* On-Demand BI – Not Just for SMB highlights the on-demand BI trend, and observes that Enterprises are embracing on-demand for a different reason. Find out why.

* Serving the Underserved: Is On-Demand BI the Answer? addresses the lack of adoption of BI amongst business users, arguably the ones who should be using it the most.

* Making Sense of Unstructured Information discusses unstructured data as a major source of business intelligence.

* Performance: The Role of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a survey of how companies use KPIs.

* “BI Appliances” are Entering the Fray and Why BI Appliances? discuss the emerging BI trend.

* Marketers Are Driven by Inward-Facing Pressures reveals some surprising facts about how marketers are using BI.

Finally, there is a very interesting company that we have covered, called Lucidera, which may be a next-up acquisition target for its compelling on-demand BI offering.