IBM buys BI vendor Cognos for $4.9 billion

IBM has announced that it will purchase business intelligence vendor Cognos, in a deal worth $4.9 billion.

The move follows on from SAP's pending purchase of Business Objects, and Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion. The move will put over half of the business intelligence and analytics market under the control of just four major vendors - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

IBM said that the move was made as part of its Information on Demand strategy, and will help expand its delivery of business intelligence beyond the traditional users.

Cognos' open-standards-based service oriented architecture (SOA) approach was also highlighted by IBM as being a good fit with its own strategies.

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, commented: "Customers are demanding complete solutions, not piece parts, to enable real-time decision making. Our broad set of capabilities - from data warehousing to information integration and analytics - together with Cognos, position us well for the changing Business Intelligence and Performance Management industry. We chose Cognos because of its industry-leading technology that is based on open standards, which complements IBM's Service Oriented Architecture strategy."