Cognos is Off the Table

Bringing an end to the speculation on who would buy Cognos (COGN), IBM (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 is something 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.